A tour to Mars is like a dream come true. Sean Doran, a visual artist, has attempted to give people a pleasure to enjoy a fly-over ride to the Martian surface. Recently, a video went viral in which the artist has tried to provide a visual essence of the experience you're likely to have when you fly above the planet.
With more than 37,000 views on YouTube, the video has become the latest sensation on the Internet. In two minutes and 20 seconds, it shows the Gorgonum Chaos, which is a depression on the planet's surface with gullies and features that indicate the presence of a bygone lake. To make this video, Doran assembled and processed relevant data collected by the University of Arizona's HiRISE camera set up on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a multipurpose spacecraft that has been developed to explore the Red Planet from orbit. The orbiter surrounds the planet from almost 200-mile above, which thereby makes the HiRISE camera to have sufficient visible light to capture the scenes. "The quality and fidelity of the data products HiRISE provide enable a virtual photograph to be taken of the Martian surface," Doran told Gizmodo. "It's not as good as being there, but it's the next best thing!"
The video has not been created using actual camera footage as it would have required heavy image processing to bring out the realistic view of the planet's surface. The artist, therefore, began collecting high-resolution elevation data and used software to develop the 3D model of the fly-over view. He then took to Photoshop to add more heavenly enhancements to the visuals. Doran used more software options to include animated images to offer the most effective and pleasant view of the barren land of Mars.
Last month, a similar animated video hit the social media platforms in which the Mars Express spacecraft images of the European Space Agency took users to soar over the Neukam Crater, located in Noachis Terra in the southern hemisphere of Mars. The crater, which is named after a German physicist and planetary scientist Gerhard Neukam, is almost 102-kilometer wide and 1-kilometre deep and has two shallow depressions along with a dune field inside.
