James Cameron to shoot Mars in 3-D

James Cameron to shoot Mars in 3-D

www.spacemart.com

After immersing movie-goers in the dazzling imaginary world of Pandora, "Avatar" director James Cameron is training his 3-D camera on a planet closer to home: Mars.
The Pasadena Star News reported Thursday that the Oscar-winning filmmaker has persuaded NASA to install a high-resolution 3-D camera on the next generation Mars rover, Curiosity, due to launch in 2011.

(visit the link for the full news article)

What do you guys think of this new development? If there were anything on mars that NASA is covering up then why would they allow such a thing to take place? It also mentions this:

"(The scientists are) going to answer a lot of really important questions about the previous and potential future habitability of Mars."

If there were anything to be hidden then surely Cameron would be required to keep it under strict confidentiality. Maybe he could be the one to blow the lid off any potential conspiracy relating to NASA.

www.spacemart.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

And....


He is going to foot the bill right

I'm all for the coolness and possible science behind it. But I smell tax dollars at work. Will he share the profits with NASA?

Cameron has been very interested in Mars for a long time. I have some direct experience with this.

I used to work for a company that represented Dr. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, and designer of NASA's mission to Mars plan, in Hollywood. Zubrin wanted to increase public interest in going to Mars and wrote a pretty decent, scientifically valid, screenplay about a Mars mission. He also wrote several books about a Mars mission and more generally about the future of space exploration. We also represented him as a technical expert for films about space exploration.

Anyway, one day James Cameron's then producing partner called our office and told us that Cameron had read one of Zubrin's books and wanted to meet him to discuss his ideas. They met, really hit it off and for a while were working pretty closely on developing two movies about a Mars mission. One was to be a big screen fiction film, the other was to be an IMAX faux documentary about such a mission (I believe that was the concept). I know Cameron's company also later bought (or maybe just optioned) the rights to Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red/Blue/Green Mars series of science fiction books. Unfortunately, all of those really bad Mars movies came out around the year 2000 (Mission to Mars being the worst), and all did poorly at the box-office, and that sort of killed Cameron and Zubrin's project, I think.

It looks like now Cameron is going to be able to do not a faux Mars documentary, but a real one with real footage from Mars, which is just astounding. The most amazing part is that the bandwidth to send all the data down for that very high resolution, cinematic digital footage will be huge, so NASA will have to allocate a lot of resources for that. It's going to be a big drain on the power for those rovers, I would think.

I have faith in Cameron. Although, i think this thread might ruin any chances of him screwing NASA over

This is so awesome. Another historic directorial record for James Cameron.

reply to post by born2BWild


I doubt hell get to shoot it himself. They will probrably just hand him selective footage for him to splice together to make his movie. I doubt if they put that HD camera onboard it will be flying over anything remotely interesting.

That would be #ing awesome. I hope we get some real pretty, 3-D tours of the red planet. Who doesn't want to see another world? This will be great

But really, we need to send PEOPLE to mars!!!!!! Not 30 years from now, TODAY god damnit! Get with it, guys.. We pay the stupid taxes that the government spends. Can we all at least agree that it would be really #ing cool to spend some of our collective money sending manned missions to other planets?

I would LOVE to pay my taxes if I knew it was going towards this effort, and in 2-5 years time somebody might be orbiting the red planet on some perilous adventure into a new world, going where no man has gone before, exploring a lost eden which -- at one time -- may have had liquid water AND LIFE on it.



I would LOVE to pay my taxes if I knew that's there they were going...

"It's a very ambitious mission. It's a very exciting mission," Cameron said. "(The scientists are) going to answer a lot of really important questions about the previous and potential future habitability of Mars."

It's his ass on the line. Any more BS and his credibilty will fly out of the the window.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
And....


He is going to foot the bill right

I'm all for the coolness and possible science behind it. But I smell tax dollars at work. Will he share the profits with NASA?

I'm surprised by your comment SLAYER69!

Personally, I think this move to implement 3D camera technology will be welcomed by most. I've lost count of the times I've read whinging from members about the poor image quality of some of NASA's photos.

I hope that the next Rover also has the ability to capture hi res video.

I'm looking forward to reading more developments on this over the next few months!

IRM

You realize that both Opportunity and Spirit have 3D (stereo) cameras on their masts, right? The difference is that these will provide true color images.

I doubt Cameron had anything to do with influencing NASA's decisions about what to put on the next rover. Not to mention that the new ones have already been delivered. They've been under development for a while.

The Mastcam, MAHLI, and MARDI investigations were selected in 2004 by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in an open competition.

www.msss.com...

[edit on 4/30/2010 by Phage]

Cameron is mentioned as "public engagement Co-Investigator". A PR guy?

[edit on 4/30/2010 by Phage]

Originally posted by Phage
Cameron is mentioned as "public engagement Co-Investigator". A PR guy?

Basically, yeah, and he's all about just that sort of thing. His (and Zubrin's) main goal in the projects they were working on was to get the masses excited enough about a manned mission to Mars that there would be a lot of political pressure to actually go forward with such a mission.

So, NASA is hoping that by helping Cameron with his project, Cameron will help them get the billions in funding they want for bigger and better projects.

I'd forgotten the Spirit and Opportunity rovers had stereoscopic cameras - necessary, I know, for navigating the terrain in three dimensions. Are new rovers going up set to have more advanced, higher resolution cameras? Maybe they are going to work with Cameron on that. I doubt they'd be any heavier than what's on Spirit and Opportunity now. The way CCD technology has been advancing, I bet any camera they put on there now would be lighter and have greater resolution than what's on those rovers. They could even be cinema quality, for all I know.

I always thought the rover images were just fine. How much more details of rocks and dirt do you really need to see? Rather they spent the effort redesigning the rovers so they could travel faster/further and look at multiple distant geographic features. We've only seen a few square miles of Mars so far.

Give it a lightweight solar racer type design and self navigating software, then send up a half dozen at a time. Instead of traveling 20 feet, stopping, waiting 20 mins for the next command, they could all just guide themselves to each location. Even if they could only travel 5 miles a day, it would be a huge improvement I think.

An off-road version of something like this would be simple and cheap to make.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/fdc6bf96ba5d.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by Phage


Thank you phage!
I'm all about the coolness and wow factor but I'm done...