Filmmaker Creates Breathtaking Mars Fly-over Video from Satellite Photographs

Renewed interest toward Mars is at an all time high currently with Hollywood movies, television shows and even governments showing fascination for the red planet. After all , other than Venus, it is Earth’s closest planetary neighbour yet it is still quite distant being 54.6 million kilometers away. Yet still, Mars is not a planet that is depicted to be an inviting planet with visually stunning vistas and fascinating geography. It can hardly be called beautiful by any stretch of the imagination but filmmaker Jan Fröjdman has taken it upon himself to sort through over 50,000 satellite fly-over photographs of Mars from the HiRISE camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in order to create a realistic simulated 3D fly-over video of the red planet.

Jan Fröjdman did not just simply create 3D renderings of the surface scanned from available information, three-dimensional information was used to create loci of reference points on the martian landscape that were then used to create a realistic perspective to the panning movement as if we were truly flying above Mars. It took a total of 33,000 handpicked reference points to realistically create the 4 minute long fly-over video.

The source photographs were all black and white so some artistic license was taken by the filmmaker in rendering the planet’s color although it is based on scientific approximation of what it would actually look like should a real fly-over trip be taken over the planet.