Roving Mars
I was lucky enough to catch the London premiere of Roving Mars a few weeks ago, the IMAX film about my two favourite space missions, Spirit and Opportunity. I have slightly mixed feelings about the film. It captures the tension of working on such a mission extremely well; the shots of the team in the control room during landing are as tense as any I can remember, and the joy, excitement and sheer relief when the news of success filters through is breathtaking. The shots of the surface are great too, but the fact that the film’s producers couldn’t wait until the end of the mission (remember, they were only supposed to last 90 days!) leads to a slightly disjointed feel. They also didn’t spend enough time setting up the scientific results of the rovers.
But Mars is a beautiful world, and with new images being returned all the time, particularly from Mars Reconaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera, I hope there will be another chance to see it on the big screen. The recent flyovers of the Spirit and Opportunity sites made with HiRISE are as good if not better than Disney’s. In fact, they’re absolutely stunning.
(Big files ahead).
Here’s Opportunity at Victoria Crater
and Spirit at the Columbia Hills
on May 2nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
The HiRISE flyovers are wonderful! Thanks very much for posting this. If anyone missed the book “Roving Mars” by Steve Squyres when it came out in 2005, it is now available in paperback as well and is well worth a read, if only to appreciate some of the effort it took to get the project off the ground (quite literally).
on May 15th, 2007 at 9:38 am
[...] It seems to be the month for stunning Mars images. Not just from the spacecraft, but from amateurs too. Damian Peach, who gets amazing and incredible results whenever he looks at the sky, sent me this animation. It’s a compilation of his 2005 images of Mars, comprising a full rotation of the planet. As Mars sails into the morning skies ahead of its opposition at the end of the year, it’s a reminder of just how good Earthbound views can be. [...]