Truly stunning footage, created using NASA’s robotic rovers, has revealed just what it would be like to walk across the surface of Mars.
YouTube’s ElderFox Documentaries has converted thousands of NASA pictures into ultra-HD images for a ‘world first’ view of the Red Planet. The team describe their documentary as “the most lifelike experience of being on Mars” and since being uploaded last week it has garnered more than 2.3 million views.
They put the images together into a ten-minute video that takes the viewer on a journey through the eyes of the NASA Spirit, Curiosity and Opportunity rovers.
The video opens with a narrator saying “the images in this video are all real”, requesting viewers to ‘sit back, relax and enjoy this journey across another world’.
There is no ‘live footage’ of the Red Planet from the NASA rovers.
But the team stitched thousands of images together to create panoramas they panned across to create an effect similar to that of a live video.
All of the images are publicly available and shared by US-based space agency NASA, including a 1.8 billion pixel mosaic of the Martian surface.
This was taken from the Glen Torridon area, consisting of more than 1,000 images from Curiosity taken last year.
Mosaics are considered a good way for NASA to increase the available quality of the images beamed-back to Earth by their rovers.
Among the panoramic images and ‘sweeping views’ featured in the video are scenes of the Meridiani Planum showing tracks made by Opportunity.
There are also views of the desert like Cape Verde, Santa Maria Crater, the John Klein drill site for the Curiosity rover and Glen Torridon that has ‘large amounts of clay’.
The narrator said: “In order to create a video like this several images must be stitched together to create a mosaic or panorama.”
Some of the images include ‘black areas’ where there is no available data or image for that section – but the team tried to exclude those parts to create a ‘life like view’.
The cameras were ‘top of the range’ on the rovers when they were first launched – 2003 for Spirit and Opportunity and 2011 for Curiosity.
