NASA's
hardy twin robots Spirit and Opportunity currently roving across the surface of
Mars will be immortalized in a fresh documentary about their wildly successful
mission.
Disney's
new IMAX film Roving Mars,
set to open nationwide on Jan. 27, chronicles the exploits of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission
that entered its third year exploring the surface of the red planet this month.
Originally slated for a 90-Martian day mission, Spirit and Opportunity have
consistently surpassed the expectations of their handlers and filmmakers
throughout their mission.
"My
original idea was to wait for the rovers to die and that it would be a dramatic
ending," Roving Mars director George Butler told SPACE.com. "However,
these rovers won't die,
which is excellent news."
On Mars,
Spirit is slowly making its way toward a rock target dubbed "Home Plate" at its
Gusev Crater landing site. Its robotic twin Opportunity, meanwhile, is
exploring a crater named Erebus on the plains of Meridiani Planum. While the
stars of Roving Mars are the rovers themselves, the film includes
comments rover scientists such as Steve Squyres, the mission's leader at
Cornell University.
"During the
landings, particularly, you really relive it," Squyres told SPACE.com of
the film. "The tension and the drama, it is all there."
With a
mission that has lasted beyond all predictions, Squyres said he and his science
team are worn but holding together. The recent addition of several new science team
members has eased the extended mission's strain, allowing mission managers to
focus on Spirit's trip toward a rock target dubbed 'Home Plate' while
Opportunity prepares for its first drive in weeks,
he added.
"The
biggest challenge was being patient while things were going on on Mars," Butler
said. "When you make a documentary like this, you never know what's going to
happen. I think it's an epic story."
Butler,
whose bodybuilding film Pumping Iron made Arnold Schwarzenegger a
household name, said the rovers' abilities - specifically their high-resolution
panoramic cameras - were the lynchpin that made the 100-minute Roving
Mars possible.
"That, to
me, was the determining factor," Butler said. "Honestly, I was not really
interested until I heard these rovers were equipped with IMAX quality cameras.
Then I thought, 'Wow, if I could put Mars on an IMAX screen that would be
great.'"
For
Squyres, Roving Mars is a vindication of sorts for the engineers behind
the panoramic cameras, or PanCams, aboard Spirit and Mars.
"We've been
saying for years that the PanCam images were good enough to look good on an
IMAX screen and by God they do," Squyres said, adding that he and his team have
not been able to view rover imagery at its full potential until now. "A
computer screen falls woefully short. It's like looking through a soda straw."
Butler's
team relied on actual data and images beamed back to Earth from Spirit and
Opportunity, as well as the computer imagery talents of Ithaca, New York-based
Maas Digital, which created original animations for NASA to illustrate the
rover mission.
"The major
difference is that when we did the earlier
animation, it was before the rovers had landed on Mars," said the Dan Maas,
of Maas Digital, in a telephone interview. "Whereas with this film...we have much
more of a historical recreation of exactly what the rovers saw."
Depictions
of the rover landings, during which they plunged through the Martian
atmosphere, deployed parachutes then bounced along the red planet's surface
with airbags, are based on data from gyroscopes and accelerometers embedded in
the landing craft, Squyres said.
Filmmakers also
overlaid digital elevation models recorded by Spirit and Opportunity with rover
imagery to generate accurate landscapes for their computer-generated
counterparts to explore, travels that again are based on mission telemetry, he
added.
Piecing
together rover images into a seamless vista for the IMAX screen sometimes took
weeks at a time, Maas said, adding that while the film is aimed at adults and
children alike, devoted rover fans will find gems like 'Adirondack,'
'Sushi'
and 'Sashimi'
- the first rock targets approached by the rovers -and others peppered in the
show.
"I think
that Mars is the most accessible planet beyond Earth," Maas said, explaining
that the red world has a special place in the hearts of young and old alike.
"It's one of the handful of places in the Solar System where we have the chance
of finding traces of current or past life. I think it's a foregone conclusion
that the next world for humans will be Mars."
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