It’s been a long, lonely three years for NASA’s Opportunity rover, which has just finished a 13-mile (21-kilometer) trek from Victoria Crater across the Martian wasteland of Meridiani Planum to Endeavour Crater. A newly released time-lapse video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory condenses the odyssey down to just three minutes.
The video draws upon a series of 309 images, each taken when the rover stopped driving at the end of a Martian day. The pictures give you a sense of the loneliness that an astronaut might feel while following in Opportunity’s wheel tracks. Drifts of sand go on for miles and miles, interrupted only by craters or patches of bedrock.
The soundtrack for the video was created by taking low-frequency recordings from Opportunity’s accelerometers and speeding them up by a factor of 1,000. “The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars,” Paolo Bellutta, a roer planner at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA’s video advisory. “When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand.”