Almost Like Being There

NASA’s Mars Rovers to Hit the Silver Screen

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.”…

“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…

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.