Mars rover landings and deployment seen in dramatic detail in NASA video created by Cornell alumnus Dan Maas

Dan Maas in his Ithaca office with a computer-generated image that shows several stages of the rover landing and deployment Copyright © Cornell University Click on the image for a high-resolution version (1700 x1100 pixels, 2.2MB)

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 actually will see.

The spacecraft rights itself and opens, and the Mars Exploration Rover 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 University alumnus and founder of Maas Digital. NASA commissioned Maas to make the video for its twin Mars rover mission. Maas, who graduated from Cornell in 2001, began creating simulations of the rover in 1998 while 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 further, 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.

After skipping two years of high school, 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, 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.

A picture of the rover based on one of Dan Maas's renderings was painted on the side of the rockets that launched the Mars missions NASA photo

To ensure scientific accuracy for the Mars video, Maas worked closely with Steven Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the science package being carried by the two rovers. Maas used a wealth of material -- conversations with Squyres and engineers, blueprints, images from NASA's Web site -- to create his computer-generated images. He even visited the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., which is managing the Mars rover mission, to talk to engineers.

He began the video by hand-sketching a storyboard, with each panel depicting a specific scene from the Mars mission. He used 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 says.

Finally, he added background music, including excerpts from the Mars movement of Holst's "The Planets Suite," adjusting the timing to coincide with events on the screen.

All of this Maas does by himself in his Ithaca office on an array of 10 PCs, mostly running the Linux operating system. He wrote custom code to augment off-the-shelf programs for the rover 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.

In the future he is planning to release some of these custom programs as commercial software. "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 says.

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