If entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Richard Branson are to be believed, it is a question of when and not whether humans will colonise Mars. But what would the last leg of a flight to the red planet look like? A video by Finland’s Jan Fröjdman, which used the HiRISE satellite data from Mars to simulate a space flight to the planet, recreates the experience
Stitching the montage together over three months, Fröjdman added colour to the grey-scale images along with sound effects such as the blast of thrusters. Wired explains how he went about creating the video:
For Fröjdman, creating the flyover effect was like assembling a puzzle. He began by colorizing the photographs (HiRISE captures images in grayscale). He then identified distinctive features in each of the anaglyphs – craters, canyons, mountains – and matched them between image pairs. To create the panning 3-D effect, he stitched the images together along his reference points and rendered them as frames in a video. “It was a very slow process,” he says.
However, if you were actually on a flight to Mars, there would be no glorious images of its moon or its red landscape to enjoy. Its dusty atmosphere would obscure the window-side views. “The best way to see the planet’s surface would be to take a digital image and enhance it on your computer,” planetary geologist Alfred McEwen, principle investigator on NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, told Wired.
Buy an annual Scroll Membership to support independent journalism and get special benefits.
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!