A tour of Mars assembled from NASA images reveals a wondrous but uninviting planet

Since it first began orbiting Mars in 2006, the HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), a powerful camera attached to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, has captured some 50,000 images of the planet. Its photographs have given scientists unprecedented access to Mars’s canyons, craters, mountains and sand dunes – the most detailed looks at the topography of another planet to date. In making A Fictive Flight Above Real Mars, the Finnish filmmaker Jan Fröjdman transformed stereoscopic anaglyphs taken by HiRISE into coloured, seemingly three-dimensional moving images, giving viewers something resembling the experience of a leisurely flight above our neighbouring planet. While often breathtaking, the video depicts unmistakably desolate, barren landscapes, hostile to human life, and still very far from a place to call home.