I was glumly certain that Curiosity's phenomenally complex, Rube-Goldberg landing system was going to be another triumph of unforgiving reality against elegant theoretical engineering. Quite happy to have been wrong, wrong, wrongity-wrong.

Man, what I'd give to see real-time footage of that last 30 seconds.

I think the recorded footage is posted on the NASA Curiosity web site.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Of course, Twitterati seem more interesting in dating the 30-year-old with the weird hair.

Yes, there are some great orbital shots of the descent and from the landed rover... what I meant was impossible here-it-comes footage from the surface. Like being able to stand and watch the sequence. The animation's nice but the real thing would be so fantastic...

I am part of the team behind mars.nasa.gov. Took some fancy footwork to stay up on Sunday night, when peripheral web sites (like the main JPL site) were going down under the load and redirecting their traffic to us. Let's just say that we had a lot of capacity at our fingertips.

I was relieved that everything worked too.

Well done, Peter, and thanks!