Mark Rober is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. In that role, Rober spent seven years working on the Curiosity project as NASA made its plans to explore Mars. “That’s nearly my entire professional career,” Rober notes, “and a quarter of my life.”

Rober has produced a video of the landing — a video told from his personal perspective, and from the perspective of the more than 3,000 people who, in some way, contributed to Curiosity’s success. “Appropriately,” Rober says, “there’s been a lot of focus on Curiosity, the rover. But what I think makes JPL really great aren’t its robots. It’s the people who build them.”

He made the video, which focuses on Curiosity’s climactic touchdown, to celebrate those people.