Using Mark Lemmon’s great data from here the MER Analyst Notebook I tried an experiment using the new ‘Table’ feature in Google Docs. Very experimental and crude, but look just how well it shows off that data. Mark has his own great feature on his homepage at TA&M, but I know of many different datasets ( engineering and scientific ) that are work exploring with this feautre.
Gizmodo and Discover have both reported that I was responsible for a particularly awesome video on youtube.
One small problem - I didn’t make it. It’s the work of another British space enthusiast, Adrian Lark. Whilst I have made quite a few animations of HiRISE elevation models, Adrians work is by far the better creation. Not only does it look better, but it’s rendering in REAL TIME. My animations take several minutes per frame to render using commercial animation software.
Adrian has written a 3D engine that can handle and render out the enormous data sets in real time, an astonishing acheivement and he deserves all the credit for this astonishing Candor Chasma animation, as well as his other brilliant animations.
This is one of my animations
And this is one of Adrians.
So - thank you to Gizmodo, Discover and others for featuring this awesome work and bringing it to the attention of a few more people…but don’t thank me for it - thank Adrian!
18 months ago - I did two things. I found the HiRISE DEM’s and I figured out how to use them. However, time and hardware move on and I thought the 3rd martian birthday of Spirit and Opportunity was a good excuse to revisit the techniques involved and try and improve where I could, on that work of 2008. Whilst I don’t think the end results are much improved, they are a bit different. I’ve made it a little hazier to mark the moderate dust storm that helped to blow out the 3 birthday candles. An intro credit page to avoid it being badly credited and described if it’s repeated elsewhere has been bolted onto the beginning, and a map has been bolted onto the end. A sound track courtesy of creative commons music. And most importantly, Spirit in her current predicament, up to the wheel-hubs in dusty sandy hate inducing Mars soil.
This then is my Columbia Hills, 2.0. My 130 second tribute to the teams that worked to produce data that documents our exploration. There is a 1920 x 1080 version, but it comes in at about 400 Meg. If you want a copy, tell me how to get it to you without killing the UMSF server. 
YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Sce-EHTRs
Vimeo : http://www.vimeo.com/6705161
HD : 1280 x 720 86 Mb : Download
SD : 640 x 360 17 Mb : Download
Of course, the brilliant thing about data being made available for anyone to have a go at, is that no matter how you think about using it - someone else has got a different idea. Purely by chance, Dr Mark Powell published a video a few days ago that takes both the HiRISE DEM, as well as near countless Navcam terrain wedges and merges them into one stunning interactive visualisation - see his work HERE.
That’s the thing with exploration, and the data it produces, you never know what you’re going to get next.