This view is taken from a Mars Express flyover video of Flaugergues Crater on Mars. It shows the final scenes of the video, which culminates with a bird’s-eye view of the 240-km-wide crater itself.
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Processing notes
The video uses data from the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera Mars Chart (HMC20W), an image mosaic made from single orbit observations of the mission’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The mosaic image, centred at 20°S/17°E, was combined with topography information from the digital terrain model to generate the three-dimensional landscape seen here.
For every second of the video, 50 separate frames are rendered following a pre-defined camera path in the scene. The vertical exaggeration used for the animation is three-fold. Atmospheric effects, like clouds and haze, have been added to conceal the limits of the terrain model. The haze starts building up at a distance of 250 km.
[Image description: A wide, oblique view of the surface of Mars, focused on a large, ancient impact crater. The scene is dominated by warm reddish‑brown terrain with many textures and shadows created by the low angle of sunlight. In the centre of the image is an enormous, shallow crater with a broad, mostly smooth floor. The rim of the crater is broken and eroded, forming a rough, uneven ring of raised terrain. Smaller impact craters of many sizes dot both the crater interior and the surrounding plains. Around the crater rim, the ground is rugged and heavily sculpted, with ridges and sloping hills that stretch outward in irregular patterns. The foreground shows more rough terrain with clusters of small craters and uneven surfaces. The background fades into a relatively flat plain with many distant craters scattered across the horizon. Overall, the landscape looks ancient, dry, and worn down by billions of years of impacts and erosion.]