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!
Mars Express doesn’t get a lot of love, all things considered. It’s main camera, HRSC, has the ability to fill in with elevation model resolution somewhere in-between old MOLA elevation, and the amazing, but limited HiRISE DEM’s seen here previously. Courtesy of a script posted at the HRSC View website - http://hrscview.fu-berlin.de/ - it is possible to turn the calibrated data into a format that is useful for animation, which is what I’ve been trying over the last year or so. Below, are three of my favorites to date. They still need work - the data can look prettier than this given some effort, but as a proof of concept and a means of visualising Mars, they’re great fun!
This is two HRSC observations - Orbits 334 and 360 - over Valles Marineris. This place makes the Grand Canyon look like a scratch. The scale and vertical exaggeration are still a work in progress - at this stage, it’s just a case of looking at something interesting.
East of Ganges Chasma, this chaotic terrain is near Aureum Chaos and struck me as a great place to animate, as the cliff faces can ‘hide’ the edges of the DEM quite well!
This is another chunk of Valles Marineris that works very well with HRSC. Calibration of HRSC colour is a challenge, but this came out looking beautiful and dynamic without it.
HRSC isn’t the highest resolution camera at Mars, nor does it produce the best elevation data - but at each different scale we look at Mars, we learn something new. At this scale, grand geological processes such as impacts, canyons, volcanos and other things that Planets might classify as life changing events, snap into view in a way that we might enjoy them were we fortunate enough to by flying over them in orbit around Mars.
July 21st (in this country) 1969 - A human put a boot-print on a place other than Earth. The Sea of Tranquility, on our moon. Go outside and look at it. A big brilliant white ball that hangs in our skies at night. There’s a small round grey patch, just left of centre, just above the equator. That is Mare Tranquilitatis. There, 39 years ago, a man climbed down a ladder, stood, for a moment, on the one of the spacecrafts footpads - stuck the toe of one boot into the grey shadowed soil, then his whole foot, and then picked up his other foot and stood - for the first time - on another body. He and a colleague spent a few short hours walking around, taking photographs, collecting samples, before climbing back into the spacecraft, launching back into orbit, rendezvousing with their faithful friend, and coming home.
