View of Mars rover is in dramatic detail in Dan Maas' video

Dan Maas '01 in his Ithaca office with a computer-generated image that shows several stages of the rover landing and deployment. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Bill Steele

You don't have to wait until January 2004 to see what exploration of the Martian landscape will be like. A remarkably lifelike video simulation is available on the Athena Web site at http://athena.cornell.edu/.

The video begins with the flame-bathed launch of a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral and shows the spacecraft embarking on its seven-month voyage to Mars. The video then dissolves to the spectacular airbag-bouncing landing, something no human eye will actually see. The spacecraft rights itself and opens, and the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) slowly unfolds and begins to roll across the bleak reddish landscape, collecting rock and soil samples.

There's not a frame of actual photography involved: The entire sequence is created in a computer -- or rather, several computers crunching incredible arrays of numbers over many hours. The graphic simulation is the work of Dan Maas, a Cornell alumnus and founder of Maas Digital LLC. NASA commissioned Maas to make the video for its two MER launches.

Maas, who graduated from Cornell in 2001, began creating simulations of the MER in 1998 while he was still an undergraduate. He has been producing digital animations since he was 10. Some of his early work includes Star Wars-style space battles and a very realistic depiction of a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter landing in his own backyard. His interest in film goes back even farther, largely because his father, James B. Maas, the noted Cornell professor of psychology, doubles as a documentary filmmaker. The elder Maas recalls giving Dan a home-built, toy film-editing machine for his third birthday.

While still in high school, Dan Maas started his own company to provide animations for television commercials. He entered Cornell at the age of 16 as a College Scholar, a program that allows students to, in effect, create their own major. He received financial support as a Frank H.T. Rhodes Presidential Research Scholar.

He studied theater arts under David Feldshuh, Cornell professor of theater, film and dance, and took film analysis and film production courses, as well as courses in math and physics. He points out that much of digital animation involves making objects behave in accordance with physical laws. For the Mars video, Maas worked closely with Steven Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the Athena science package carried by the two MERs.

Maas uses a wealth of material -- conversations with Squyres and engineers, blueprints, images from NASA's Web site -- to create his computer-generated images. He has even visited the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., to talk to the engineers managing the MER mission.

He begins each video by hand-sketching a storyboard, with each panel depicting a specific scene from the Mars mission. He uses a computer-aided design program and blueprints provided by JPL to construct a virtual, three-dimensional model of the rover. The model is actually a mathematical description from which a computer can construct an image of the machine as seen from any direction. Just as in hand-drawn animation, digitized sequences are composites of separately constructed background and moving images. The final step is rendering -- the process that adds realistic lighting and shadows -- to the nearly 12,000 individual frames of animation that make up the eight minutes of finished video. The software even simulates lens flare -- the bright flash caused when a camera briefly looks toward the sun -- and film grain.

"My goal was to make the animation resemble something that was actually filmed as closely as possible -- that's why I added film grain and animated at 24 frames per second, just like a live-action film," Maas said.

All of this Maas does by himself in his Ithaca office on an array of 10 PCs, mostly running the Linux operating system. He has written custom code to augment off-the-shelf programs for the MER video. They include a program that renders accurate star fields using a NASA star database, a high-dynamic-range compositing system that provides better color resolution than any commercially available compositor and a server that automatically coordinates rendering on his network of computers.

"This is not very different from the processes Hollywood uses to make CGI [computer graphics imagery] for movies. The difference is that they have a lot of people," Maas said. In the future he hopes to expand his company and release some custom programs as commercial software.

Besides NASA, he has done projects for the Public Broadcasting Service "Nova" series and created a simulated space station and Mars colony for the BBC's "Tomorrow's World." His still pictures for the Mars mission have appeared in Time and Discover magazines. His image of the rover are painted on the Delta II rockets that send the real rovers into space.

Maas' video and high-resolution still pictures can be downloaded at Digital Cinema: http://www.maasdigital. com or from the Athena Web site at http://athena.cornell.edu/.