Here's What a Flyby of Mars Might Look Like

[Buster's Uncle]

Here's What a Flyby of Mars Might Look Like
Cobbled together from thousands of hi-res NASA images.
Popular Mechanics
By David Grossman  Mar 20, 2017






The goal of a human mission to Mars remains in President [Sleezebag]'s budget, and Elon Musk's SpaceX is actively studying potential landing sites on the fourth planet. But until humans get to the Red Planet, Finnish filmmaker Jan Frodjman has stitched together a reasonable look at what they might be seeing during the initial flyovers.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwfpSa3-npk" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwfpSa3-npk</a>

These images come from NASA's HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, which allows scientists to distinguish physical features on Mars down to around three feet tall. The HiRISE, along with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, began taking photos in 2006 and hasn't stopped since. Frodjman had thousands of images to choose from in building up a 3D view of the planet's surface.

"It has really been time-consuming making these panning clips," Frodjman says on his blog. "In my 3D-process I have manually hand-picked reference points on the anaglyph image pairs. For this film I have chosen more than 33.000 reference points! It took me 3 months of calendar time working with the project every now and then."

The colors probably aren't quite accurate, Frodjman says, because his "images are based on grayscale images." The colors of the Martian surface are up for debate—just last year, the Curiosity rover found stunning purple rocks. The only way to update Frodjman's fictive journey is for us to go there ourselves.


http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a25744/heres-what-a-flyby-of-mars-might-look-like/