We've posted several 'flyover' videos of Mars that use real data from spacecraft. But this video might be the most spectacular and realistic. Created by filmmaker Jan Fröjdman from Finland, the video uses actual data from the venerable HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and takes you on a 3-D tour over steep cliffs, high buttes, amazing craters, polygons and other remarkable landforms. But Fröjdman also adds a few features reminiscent of the landing videos taken by the Apollo astronauts. Complete with crosshatches and thruster firings, this video puts you on final approach to land on (and then take off from) Mars' surface.

To create the video, Fröjdman used 3-D anaglyph images from HiRISE (High Resolution Science Imaging Experiment), which contain information about the topography of Mars surface and then processed the images into panning video clips.
Fröjdman told Universe Today he worked on this video for about three months.

"The most time consuming was to manually pick the more than 33,000 reference points in the anaglyph images," he said via email. "Now when I count how many steps there were in total in the process, I come to seven and I needed at least 6 different kinds of software."

Layered deposits in Uzboi Vallis on Mars, as seen by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Fröjdman, a landscape photographer and audiovisual expert, said he wanted to create a video that gives you the feeling "that you are flying above Mars looking down watching interesting locations on the planet," he wrote on Vimeo. "And there are really great places on Mars! I would love to see images taken by a landscape photographer on Mars, especially from the polar regions. But I'm afraid I won't see that kind of images during my lifetime."

Between HiRISE and the Curiosity rover images, we have the next best thing to a human on Mars. But maybe one day...

Fröjdman has previously posted other space-related videos, including video and images of the Transit of Venus in 2012 he took from an airplane, and a lunar eclipse in 2011.

A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS from Jan Fröjdman on Vimeo.