Life on Mars?

Some time before 2020, there is to be another unmanned mission to Mars. It will carry a sophisticated, robotic  'Mars Rover' and engineers from Astrium in Stevenage are hard at work testing the cameras and vision systems being developed for the mission.

Oxygen's lighting cameraman, Dave Jackson, joined tv news crews at the Lafarge Quarry in Sandy Bedfordshire to shoot a High Definition record of the trials - and the news crews - for the Astrium archives.

The Quarry provides an environment similar in appearance to the surface of Mars - in terms of colour, texture and structure. And the stunning footage is eerily evocative of how we understand the red planet to be ... until, of course, the test team members, lost in their work, appear in vision!