The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landing in Jezero Crater on the Red Planet less than two weeks ago, but the advanced robot has already returned some of history’s most memorable movies.
The cameras of the rover and the descent module that carried it through the Martian atmosphere documented the last minutes of the long journey from Earth in a remarkable and spectacular way. With the spectacular landing out of the way, the much cooler but no less intriguing task of exploring the surface begins.
Irish filmmaker Sean Doran took some of the first footage taken by Perseverance from inside Jezero Crater and processed it to create This is Mars, a short film that is one of the most gripping 30-minute panoramic shots you’ll ever see.
Doran took a series of photos from Perseverance’s mast-mounted camera system (Mastcam-Z) taken on the rover’s fifth Martian day on the planet, tweaked them, stitched them together, and set them to music. The results are, well, otherworldly.
The expansive panorama is meditative to look at and is reminiscent of some volcanic or desert landscapes on Earth. It’s easy to see why Mars analogues are located in places like Utah and Hawaii.
The raw image data is publicly available via NASA feed and Perseverance has already returned thousands of images. Doran writes on YouTube that the footage was “denoised, repaired, graded and upscaled for this film”.
Look at this:
Watch NASA’s Perseverance landing video (and listen…
5:34
The crisp visuals also bring sharper resolution to just how treacherous Perseverance’s landing in Jezero Crater was. The rover’s immediate surroundings appear to be littered with large boulders and at least one fairly steep cliff.
It will be exciting to watch the sequels to this film as Perseverance begins to roll and explore further.
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