Stop What You’re Doing and Fly Over This Amazing Crater Rim on Mars

We’ve seen a lot of awesome pictures from robotic probes on Mars over the years. And yet the sheer awesomeness of this screenshot from a high-definition simulated movie of Mojave Crater blew us away.

While not a direct image, the shot was recreated with spectacular precision using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. MRO is loaded with one of the best cameras in the solar system, the HiRISE camera, which can see features on the Martian surface as small as a meter. HiRISE will shoot the same area from slightly different angles to produce stereo pairs that can be viewed in 3-D and used to make incredible terrain models. If you’ve got a pair of funky 3-D glasses handy, you can explore a more than 3,000 features on Mars.

This particular shot comes from a 2009 flyover movie called “Soaring Over Mars” that takes you through canyons and craters, which you can see below. The image shows the amazing mountainous rim of Mojave crater, a 50-kilometer-wide impact scar that has recorded the watery history of Mars. Alluvial fans on Mojave result from heavy downpours at some point in the past, looking remarkably similar to features in the Mojave desert in California, hence the crater’s name.

Adam is a Wired Science staff writer. He lives in Oakland, Ca near a lake and enjoys space, physics, and other sciency things.