‘…high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers – Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Cal tech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU) was stitched together by Elder Fox Documentaries, creating what they call the most life like experience of being on Mars….’ (Open Culture)
As someone who has done his share of traveling around western US landscapes but who is not geologically sophisticated, what struck me about this was not how otherworldly it felt to travel around Mars but, to the contrary, how familiar it seemed. In a way there is something comforting about that. As a science fiction reader, I used to feel that many attempts to describe extraterrestrial landscapes felt disappointingly lame and prosaic (off the top of my head, think of Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Walk in the Dark”), but that turns out to be just right. Actually, the skies of these scenes felt much more alien than the terrain.
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