Created by Sitraka Rakotoniaina and Bethany Rigby, Mars Terrain Playback is a small electric vehicle that replays sections of Perseverance’s journey across Mars. Following an enquiry into simulation and reenactment, the project is an attempt to design things that let us rehearse encounters with places we cannot yet physically reach.
NASA’s record of the rover’s position is mapped onto digital elevation data of the Martian surface, reconstructing the changing slopes of the terrain along its path.
This digital reconstruction is then played back by an analogue twin built from mobility scooter wheels and a series of nested, motorised gimbal frames, with a chair mounted on top. As it moves, the gimbal frames tilt the person sitting on the chair, in an attempt to bring the distant planetary landscape down to human scale.
Mars Terrain Playback was made as part of Planetary Poetics (2026, 22’14”), a film by Sitraka Rakotoniaina and Bethany Rigby. Moving between Río Tinto in Spain, Madagascar, the Moon and Mars, the film explores different forms of intimacy with the ground.
Rock-consuming microbes, relations with ancestors through Famadihana, and attempts to encounter Martian terrain from Earth, through assemblies of machinery, bring us into different kinds of proximity with worlds whose lives and histories exceed our own. Through these encounters, we also ask ourselves how attachments take shape. How might alternative and non-extractive ways of becoming familiar with another world change what we feel entitled to do there? And how are the futures we imagine for outer space already taking shape in our relationships with places here on Earth? Surface and ground became starting points for a shared enquiry, bringing our practices together. We’re interested in how these different intimacies might open ways of approaching the unknown through reciprocity, and how that could find expression in the things we make.
Sitraka Rakotoniaina
The duo made the film as their contribution to the Ethnographies of Outer Space: Situating Postplanetary Futures conference, organised by the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) network and hosted by Leuphana University. The film was screened at Scala cinema in Lüneburg as part of the conference.
The vehicle uses a custom web application in JavaScript and Three.js to visualise Perseverance’s traverse and stream the data used for terrain playback. NASA’s record of the rover’s position is mapped onto digital elevation data of the Martian surface to reconstruct the changing slopes along its path.
The physical rover uses a custom ESP32-based control board to drive two brushless electric scooter wheels and two linear actuators. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) and two angle sensors monitor the chair’s position and orientation.
Sitraka Rakotoniaina | Bethany Rigby
