5! Just five days to go until Curiosity lands on Mars. Have you checked out the crazy landing method?

NASA must be incredibly confident in the engineering behind the entry, descent and landing (EDL - everything about NASA has to have acronyms!) stage of Mars Curiosity's trip to the red planet to put out a YouTube clip called "Seven Minutes of Terror".

Some would say it's tempting fate. But we're scientists so we don't believe in fate, right? Right?

But the people working on the project I've talked with are confident, so that's good enough for me. (Nah not really - I'll be sweating it out like everyone else!)

And you can't blame NASA for playing it up a bit - it's resulting in amazing exposure for this critical stage of this critical project. It's not make-or-break for NASA, but there is an incredible amount riding on its success.

So if you missed it when it first went viral across the Twitterverse, here is Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror:





Here's a somewhat less dramatic version of the EDL process: