HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) is the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. So, not surprisingly, it has shot some of the most stunning images of Mars we’ve ever seen. Scientists have recently shared a HiRISE image of a crater on the Red Planet. Thanks to Seán Doran, we get to see it in color, 8K resolution, and explore nearly every little detail of it.
HiRISE is one of six instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was launched in 2005, arrived at Mars in 2006, and it’s been shooting photos ever since. The camera has a high-resolution capability of imaging up to 30 centimeters per pixel, which is “unprecedented for any existing orbiter in the study of the Red Planet.” Of course, all those photos are not only visually stunning, but they have provided significant data for hundreds of scientific papers.
For the video above, Sean used the data provided by the HiRISE camera. The frame height is around 1km taken from an orbit height of 250km. Sean took the raw image and denoised it, blended, graded, and rescaled. Finally, he animated it to create the footage which appears as a flight above the crater.
Seán Doran has animated many photos from NASA, turning them into beautiful videos. He has also edited and color-graded many of the raw images from NASA’s gallery. Make sure to watch and enjoy the video above in full screen, and follow Sean on YouTube and Flickr for more of his work.
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