The past 4 weeks has brought a surge of activity to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) channel on YouTube. The cause of this activity is a video called "Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror," which, at the time of this post, has 768,825 views.
The video is now more popular than their second most-viewed "First Movie of Asteroid 2005 YU55," which, at the time of this post, racked up 717,138 views over an 8 month period.
Over the past month, the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video has also surpassed the "Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover Animation," a video that contains the same graphics as the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video, AND was posted more than a year ago!
So what enabled the new video about the rover landing to surpass the previous video of the rover landing that got a 1 year head start??
Clearly, the use of music, quick edits, and dramatic commentary have helped audiences digest and share the information presented. Coupled with the proximity to the actual landing, the video has truly gone viral - and I'm predicting that it will reach 1 million views by the time Curiosity touches Martian soil.
Update: As of August 4, the video has over 1.3 Million views, it's the first NASA video to break 1 Million views, and has plenty of time to rack up some more hits before the landing.
No comments:
Post a Comment