Package Tour: Astrium rover heads to Spain

The dormant volcano Mount Teide towers over the holiday island of Tenerife, officially the highest point in Spain even though it’s hundreds of miles from the Spanish mainland. Some 30km from the package tourist-packed hotels and beaches - two of them vertically - it’s a striking landscape of wrinkled, solidified lava flows, isolated twisted rocks, spectacular cathedral-sized outcrops topped with glistening obsidian and gravelly plains dotted with porous, hollow-sounding pumice.

Vegetation is low and sparse and wildlife is shy and mostly invisible. It looks like the surface of another planet and, indeed, has stood in for one several times in films, as well as forming a vision from the distant past (as a backdrop to Raquel Welch in a fur bikini in One Million Years BC) and the far future (in the recent remake of Planet of the Apes).

To a space geek, however, the red-tinged rocks and dust make it reminiscent of one particular planet; it looks very much like the images returned from landers on the surface of Mars. That impression was bolstered last month by a strange visitor to Teide’s gravel fields. Silvery, stocky and studded with masts and sensors, the stolid form of one of EADS Astrium’s Mars rover prototypes spent three days trundling cheerily around the landscape accompanied by a motley crew of scientists and engineers, all well equipped with sunblock, bottled water and floppy sunhats.