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If entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Richard Branson are to be believed, it is a question of when and not whether humans will colonise Mars. But what would the last leg of a flight to the red planet look like? A video by Finland’s Jan Fröjdman, which used the HiRISE satellite data from Mars to simulate a space flight to the planet, recreates the experience

Stitching the montage together over three months, Fröjdman added colour to the grey-scale images along with sound effects such as the blast of thrusters. Wired explains how he went about creating the video:

For Fröjdman, creating the flyover effect was like assembling a puzzle. He began by colorizing the photographs (HiRISE captures images in grayscale). He then identified distinctive features in each of the anaglyphs – craters, canyons, mountains – and matched them between image pairs. To create the panning 3-D effect, he stitched the images together along his reference points and rendered them as frames in a video. “It was a very slow process,” he says.  

However, if you were actually on a flight to Mars, there would be no glorious images of its moon or its red landscape to enjoy. Its dusty atmosphere would obscure the window-side views. “The best way to see the planet’s surface would be to take a digital image and enhance it on your computer,” planetary geologist Alfred McEwen, principle investigator on NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, told Wired.