The first photographic tour of the surface of another planet has now been accomplished.
Those who thrilled to the lunar beauty of Full Moon and the IMAX smash Roving Mars will marvel at this awesome, vivid, beautiful portrait of what it is like to take a stroll on Mars.
The most fantastic of all journeys - the Spirit and Opportunity mobile robot missions to the surface of Mars - produced over 150,000 astonishing photographs. While the images were made available on low-resolution computer screens as they were sent back across millions of space miles, no one until now has done the painstaking work of editing, cropping, and processing these massive (often larger than 100 megabytes) images.
The person to do it is Jim Bell, the scientist and photographer who led the photography team on this historic expedition. With his unique perspective, these photographs take us from the brave launches of these robots, to the alien landscape they discovered and the mysteries of the planet that they have helped to solve.