Los Angeles – 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.
What they never imagined was that those photographs would actually reach an Imax audience.
Earlier missions had taken less sophisticated photos of Mars’ surface, the kind only an astronomer could love. But when Squyres and 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,” 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 last Friday in 25 Imax theaters across North America, audiences could 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 Walt Disney Co., 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 Squyres’ 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 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, Butler said, Tim Squyres was on the phone with his brother, talking about the Mars project, when Butler heard him mention Imax-quality cameras – “the magic line,” he said. He was instantly hooked.
A month later, Butler screened the Shackleton film in Washington for members of Congress and other officials, including Sean O’Keefe, then the NASA administrator, who opened doors in the space program.
His project finally got moving, Butler said, when he approached the producer Frank Marshall, who had wanted to distribute the Shackleton movie and loved the Mars idea. Marshall took it to Disney, where a deal was struck – but only after Squyres had satisfied studio skeptics that Imax-caliber images could truly be transmitted all the way from Mars.
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 and slowing them down. But Squyres said 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,” 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.” That included about 400 hours of high-definition film of the entire mission over three years, Butler said – a trove that he said might otherwise have gone untapped for a wide audience.
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 Maas digitally inserted into the panoramic pictures the rovers had shot.
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.”