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It would be cool to see a short video clip of a rover's eye view of driving across mars. Just a few seconds even.

In general, due to limitations in data storage space, bandwidth, and limited duration of line-of-sight access to orbiting spacecraft, rover data that we see is usually a series of still images, each taken at a different key moment.

Just once, has anyone got a hold of a sufficient memory allocation to take a rapid frame rate of images, even once a second, to put together what looks like a GIF or a video of doing something on Mars, or anywhere else beyond the Earth and Moon?

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It depends on what you consider a "video". Since space probes only take photos, "videos" can be achieved by stitching multiple frames, but then those videos are usually low FPS. Since your title isn't limited to rovers, here are some examples:

Descent of Curiosity on Mars:

Descent of Huygens on Titan:

Jupiter from Voyager (here each frame is one Jupiter day apart, so technically this is also a video?):

And here's a video of an actual rover: Spirit being stuck in the sand on Mars:

Here's the Curiosity timelapse:

So as you can see, they are mostly timelapses, made from individual photos.

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  • $\begingroup$ These are all really excellent! Thank you for finding so many examples and collecting them in one place for others to enjoy. $\endgroup$ – uhoh Dec 8 '18 at 22:48
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    $\begingroup$ I just ran across this: planetary.org/multimedia/space-images/mars/… $\endgroup$ – uhoh Dec 15 '18 at 16:03

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