A new article from The Planetary Society says that Star Trek: Picard “gets the Martian landscape right”. And a good thing, too, because it’s right there on the screen, several times, if not for very long.

Emily Lakdawalla, a Solar System Specialist with The Planetary Society, described her experience attending a preview screening of the first three episodes of Picard at the Hollywood Arclight Cinema last month. She said she has opinions on the show, but it’s the show’s depiction of Mars that’s the focus of her article. She said, “In particular, all of the first 3 episodes open with orbital views of Mars. And they were instantly recognizable. Not just as in - hey, I get that this is supposed to be Mars, but - hey, I know that place and that place, and there’s Schiaparelli crater which means Opportunity landed right there to the left and - oh no, Mars blew up again.” (That’s not a spoiler, by the way; we’ve seen that in the trailers.)

Lakdawalla wanted to know more about how the show’s artists produced those scenes, so she sat down with VFX supervisor and Emmy nominee Jason Zimmerman, to learn more. He explained that the realism you see on screen is from attention to details that you can’t see. “Ultimately,” he said, “those fine details that you may not necessarily see probably will be represented somehow in the texture that you would see in a wider shot.”

He went on to explain that on Star Trek, they try to get the science right because the fans care so much. “It’s a little daunting,” he said, “because it’s something that people know. [...] We definitely wanted Mars to be recognizable, and to be faithful to what it was supposed to look like based on NASA and everybody else that’s got pictures and recreations of it.”

You can watch Zimmerman’s scientifically-accurate depiction of Mars get blown up for yourself, on Star Trek: Picard, now streaming on CBS All Access.