With all the robots headed for Mars lately, this seems like timely news. From a recent issue of a Springer-Verlag technical journal comes this paper, entitled A stereo-vision system for support of planetary surface exploration, that describes a vision system developed for the ESA. The system uses a variety of algorithms to process images from stereo vision sensors and create a 3D terrain map. The system is self-calibrating to allow for the stresses likely to occur during an extended space voyage. The self-calibration algorithm is based on epipolar geometry. A demo of how it works can be found on the VISICS website in Belgium.