Full orbit: How an astronaut will view Mars from orbit - with distance counter

This movie was generated from 600 individual still images captured by the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board Mars Express during the 8194th orbit on 27 May 2010 between 02:00 and 09:00 UTC (04:00-11:00 CEST) and were transmitted to Earth a few hours later via ESA’s 35m New Norcia deep space station in Australia. The portion of the movie where the planet beneath the spacecraft was dark has been largely removed since no detail was visible. The images show the spacecraft’s slow descent from high above t