Sunday, November 3, 2013

First-time 3D Mars video lets you fly over Mars: ‘For the first time, we can see Mars spatially — in three dimensions’

(We recommend watching the amazing video in full screen. Click on the full screen icon on the right bottom of the video.)


Experience Mars and its stunning mountains, craters, ancient river beds and lava flows in this newly released 3D Mars video that lets you fly over the Red Planet. 

The 3D Mars video was created from images taken by the European satellite which orbited the red planet about 12,500 times. The newly released Mars 3D video “provides a richly detailed, three-dimensional view of the Red Planet,” reported Space.com on Nov. 1, 2013.

"For the first time, we can see Mars spatially — in three dimensions," said Ralf Jaumann, the project manager for the Mars Express mission at the German Aerospace Center.

Mars Express is the European Space Agency's first spacecraft built to explore another planet and the Mars 3D video was produced by the European Space Agency in joined forces with the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

The Mars Express satellite is equipped with a high-resolution stereoscopic camera and a mineralogical mapping spectrometer. Nine light-sensitive detectors aboard Mars Express sweep across the surface of the planet and can capture sequential images of the red planet from nine different angles. The data taken from Mars Express is then processed into three-dimensional images by planetary researchers at the German Aerospace Center.