Rover Mars 3D opens this Fri

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/movies/25mars.html

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 24 - A dozen years ago, when they were just what-iffing how to build remote-controlled vehicles for exploring the surface of Mars, Steve Squyres and Jim Bell, scientists at Cornell University, already knew they wanted their rovers to have cameras worthy of an Imax screen.

Ron Batzdorff/Walt Disney Pictures
George Butler, the director of the Imax documentary "Roving Mars."
What they never imagined was that those photographs would actually reach an Imax audience. And without a relative's connections to the movie industry, a documentary maker's connections in Washington, a college student's computer-animating talents and a team of rocket scientists' ability to stitch hundreds of one-megapixel pictures into a seamless high-resolution tapestry, they never would have.

Earlier missions had taken less sophisticated photos of Mars's surface, the kind only an astronomer could love. But when Dr. Squyres and Dr. Bell were jotting ideas on a blank sheet of paper, they resolved to give their robots 20-20 vision.

"One of our big goals was to make this an experience like you were there," Dr. Bell said. "The impression we wanted to create was, you step out of your little capsule, you feel a dusty breeze through your hair, and you're seeing this alien landscape for the first time."

The dusty breeze may be a bit of a stretch. But starting Friday in 25 Imax theaters across North America, audiences will be able to behold, for the first time in all their side-of-a-barn-size glory, the visual harvest of the rovers and their more than two years of plowing over the red planet's rocky terrain after traveling hundreds of millions of miles.

The 40-minute movie, "Roving Mars," which was sponsored by Lockheed Martin and is being released by the Walt Disney Company, tells the story of the mission team's mad dash to ready the rovers for launching in 2003, of the tense moments waiting for them to communicate after landing on Mars, and of the eye-opening discoveries the rovers have made since then.

The rovers Dr. Squyres's team designed, Spirit and Opportunity, were expected to last for 90 days or so before succumbing to the harsh Martian landscape and minus-110-degree nights. They proved unexpectedly hardy, and are sending data and pictures home to NASA to this day.

"Roving Mars" was itself launched in 2000, when George Butler, the director of "The Endurance," a documentary on Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1914, was cutting an Imax version of that film. His editor was Tim Squyres, brother of Steve, who has edited many of Ang Lee's films and whose work on "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" that year earned him an Oscar nomination.

At one point that June, Mr. Butler said, Tim Squyres was on the phone with his brother, talking about the Mars project, when Mr. Butler heard him mention Imax-quality cameras - "the magic line," he said. He was instantly hooked.

A month later, Mr. Butler screened the Shackleton film in Washington for members of Congress and other officials, including Sean O'Keefe, who was then the NASA administrator. When Mr. Butler told Mr. O'Keefe he had designs on a Mars movie, he said, Mr. O'Keefe offered to help in any way.

Mr. O'Keefe opened doors in the space program, but Mr. Butler said he encountered more resistance, oddly enough, among Imax film production companies, none of which were interested in his idea. "They said that space had been done," he said.

His project finally got moving, Mr. Butler said, when he approached the producer Frank Marshall, who had wanted to distribute the Shackleton movie and loved the Mars idea. Mr. Marshall took it to Disney, where a deal was struck - but only after Dr. Squyres had satisfied studio skeptics that Imax-caliber images could truly be transmitted all the way from Mars.

Indeed, the cameras that Dr. Squyres and Dr. Bell had installed on the rovers - somewhere shy of the state of the art even when the rovers were designed - could capture only one megapixel at a time, about the equivalent of a cellphone camera. That would mean stitching about 250 images together seamlessly to create a panoramic picture big enough to fill an Imax screen - a task that takes one to three days on Mars, where the solar-powered rovers can function for only a few hours around noon.

Worse, the distance from Earth restricts the bandwidth of data transmissions to that of an old 128-kilobyte dial-up modem, meaning that it can take up to a week to send a panoramic picture back. (All told, the rovers have put together a portfolio of about two dozen big panoramas, according to Dr. Bell, who is writing a coffee-table book that will include many of them.)

Mr. Butler began filming two months before the launching date, and overcame resistance from NASA engineers who did not want his camera crew, intruding into their sterile assembly rooms, to slow them down. But Dr. Squyres said Mr. Butler's stroke of genius was in renting an Imax theater near Cape Canaveral to screen a few minutes for the entire mission team, just days before the launching of the Spirit rover.

"It was glorious," Dr. Squyres said. "You could just feel this chill go through the audience. That was the moment when we realized the power of the Imax format for telling what is actually a very visual and cinematic story. After that, George pretty much had access to whatever he wanted."

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That included about 400 hours of high-definition film of the entire mission over three years, Mr. Butler said - a trove that he said might otherwise have gone untapped for a wide audience.

"Is there anything better that Americans are doing these days than that mission to Mars?" he said. "Here's a space program done for a very low budget, 600 to 800 million dollars. Ten years ago it would have cost a billion dollars. This was a cut-rate mission to Mars. And there was no one to tell the story of what happened."

It was a young Cornell student, Dan Maas, who added the movie's final major ingredient: double-take-inducing computer animations of the rovers' trips to Mars and landings on the planet's surface, and animated images of the rovers that Mr. Maas digitally inserted into the panoramic pictures the rovers had shot.

The intent was to show the rovers going about their tasks, but taking actual pictures of the rovers was impossible, given that each was on a different side of the planet. So Mr. Maas, who is now 24, applied the skills he had learned as an intern at two different Hollywood special-effects houses, this time in the service of accuracy.

"In many cases, we'd take the actual images from the rover and work them a little bit to give you an outside point of view," Mr. Maas said. "We'd build some 3-D geometry, and move the camera off to the side. But the reason that the animated images look so much like the rover's images is that they're made of the real rover images."

In the film, it can be hard to distinguish between the rovers' panoramas - which are still photographs, not video - and 3-D pictures rendered by computer as if seen by someone traversing the surface of Mars, on land or in the air.

"We took great pains to make all of the terrain accurate," Mr. Maas said. "The layperson isn't going to know this, but for somebody who's familiar with the mission, it's all based on 3-D data that was sent back. Every little scrap of rock - it's actually there on Mars."

Dr. Squyres, who said his hope for the mission had been to "show people Mars as it really is," said the movie had matched his own imagination - and exceeded what NASA could do on its own.

"I was finally seeing the Mars that I've had in my head all these months," he said. "We have good computer graphics, but the display capability falls far short of what Imax can do. This is the best look at our data I've ever had. It's the best reconstruction of the landing I've ever seen."