Amazing Flyover Reveals What Soaring Across Mars Would Look Like
upstart writes:
Amazing Flyover Reveals What Soaring Across Mars Would Look Like:
Many of us have dreamed about flying over the surface of Mars-someday. The planet offers so many cool places to study, and doing it in person is something for future Marsnauts to consider.
The Mars Express spacecraft has been mapping the Red Planet for years. It now gives us an up-close look now, through an animation of thousands of images of Mars from its cameras.
One of the most striking areas on Mars is its Noctis Labyrinthus-Latin for the "Labyrinth of Night." It lies between Mars's Valles Marineris and the gigantic volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge.
This shattered terrain is a system of valleys that stretch out across nearly 1,200 kilometers. Scientists combined ESA's Mars Express images into an amazing flyover of this terrain, giving us a tasty hint of what future explorers will see.
[...] It's cool to think of Mars Express focusing a high-resolution movie camera on the surface. However, this movie comprises many individual images. The views come from more than eight Mars Express orbits.
In addition to images, the team combined images with topographic information from a digital terrain model. That helped the visualization team generate a three-dimensional landscape, with every second of the video comprising 50 separate frames rendered according to a pre-defined camera path.
In addition to showing the ancient history of Mars terrain, the video also shows some Mars Express history. The opening credits (Mars globe, first 24 seconds) were created using the recent 20-year Mars global color mosaic.
Haze has been added to conceal the limits of the terrain model. It starts building up at a distance of between 150 and 200 km. The video is centered at the Martian coordinates of 7S, 265E.
A four-minute video of the flyby.
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