James Cameron Wants to Film Martian Surface in 3-D

I just stumbled across this article and it may interest some here .
According to space.com James Cameron is working with NASA to mount a3-D camera on the Curiosity rover , due to launch in 2011.

"You could take a movie and image clouds moving in the sky or a dust devil moving," said Joy Crisp, JPL deputy project scientist on Mars Science Laboratory, the official name for the rover project. "As you're driving, you could take a movie."

Source
If they can get the mission and the camera to Mars this should be something to really look forward to .

[edit on 30-4-2010 by gortex]

A bit of hype here.

First, both Opportunity and Spirit have stereo (3d) cameras.

Second, the mastcams for MSL have been delivered and do have stereo capabilities. That has been part of the spec since 2004.

Part of that original spec was a zoom capability. That was what was canceled in 2007. I don't really know if Cameron had anything to do with it but Malin was given the opportunity of attempting to go back to that spec (with zoom), if they can meet the schedule.
www.msss.com...

Again, stereo (3d) has always been part of the picture. The mastcams provide HD quality, and limited video capabilities. Another added feature is that these cameras will provide true color imagery of Mars. We'll get to see what color it really is.



[edit on 4/30/2010 by Phage]

With all his dosh, Cameron could pay for his own mars mission!

He is very interested in space exploration though, I've seen him talk about that. However, this is straying too close to Survivor Celebrity Astronaut Idol on Ice for my liking. What next, Steve Austin vs the Martian Monolith in 3D!?!

reply to post by Phage


They say this will record movies at 10 fps and let them record while they're driving , is this not a step forward ?.
Do the current rovers have the ability to record Dust Devils and clouds at 10fps , surely that will give more detail of their movement and give us a more realistic picture of Mars

reply to post by gortex

No. The current rovers don't have that capability. The MSL will. But it was going to anyway, without Cameron's input.

I'm not putting it down. It's good stuff. It's just the extra hype I don't really appreciate. On the other hand, any good publicity is good.

reply to post by gortex


Any film of Mars should cut to the chase and be of what we have termed anomalies. Such as the figurine, the seemingly huge "wood" beam, the area where rectangles are seen, the hill containing that black mass termed a cairn, the "cemeteries and, if possible, visit the face area and crawl all over it. Otherwise if a film doesn't include these "mysteries" it will be just another production.

However, anaglyph 3-D is a total bore.

reply to post by The Shrike


I found a list of prospective landing sights , if any of those anomalies are located in the area you may be in luck
Mawrth Vallis, Eberswalde Crater, Holden Crater, and Gale Crater.
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/fafa279373ff.jpg[/atsimg]

The candidate MSL landing sites are shown in the above figures as ellipses of approximately 20 by 25 kilometers (12.4 by 15.5 miles) size. Each ellipse is placed approximately, as the exact location may change slightly as mission plans evolve. On the left is the Mawrth Vallis site, located on light-toned layered rock near 24.3°N, 19.0°W. At the center are the landing site candidates in Eberswalde Crater (near 24.1°S, 33.4°W) and southern Holden Crater (near 26.6°S, 35.0°W). On the right is the landing site candidate in northwestern Gale Crater (near 4.5°S, 222.7°W). The orange feature in Gale is a fan of sediment transported to the crater floor by a channel that cuts the crater's northwestern wall. Each figure is shown at the same scale and north is up. These are mosaics of Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) red wide angle images acquired during the May 1999 Geodesy Campaign. The data were map-projected and mosaiced by Malin Space Science Systems personnel.

www.planetary.org...

[edit on 1-5-2010 by gortex]

Originally posted by The Shrike
Any film of Mars should cut to the chase and be of what we have termed anomalies.

There's a problem with that, who are the "we"?

What you think are anomalies may not be the same things I think are anomalies (in fact, I don't remember seeing any anomaly, because I don't know what's normal on Mars ).

Such as the figurine, the seemingly huge "wood" beam, the area where rectangles are seen, the hill containing that black mass termed a cairn, the "cemeteries and, if possible, visit the face area and crawl all over it.

Do you mean the small rock, the flat rock (that's not huge, I don't know where did you got that idea) and the dark rock?

If it's in the same area that was already explored by other missions it would be a strange option to ignore all other areas that are yet to explore.

Otherwise if a film doesn't include these "mysteries" it will be just another production.

And if it includes but doesn't show what people want to see they will say that it was faked.

Originally posted by Phage

Another added feature is that these cameras will provide true color imagery of Mars. We'll get to see what color it really is.

Wait. What?

Isn't the standard debunk on the true colors of Mars that you can't really know for sure what the colors are unless you are there yourself?

Every time somone says Mars isn't as red as we have been told, somone goes on about how the images are assembled from color filter black and white images, and that it just simply isn't possible to be certain what the colors are. They say this despite the fact that the rovers have a color chart that the cameras can focus on. The whole point of the chart is to calibrate the images and get the "real" colors, but this doesn't seem to matter to the debunkers.

So how are they going to all of a sudden be able to send a rover that can get true color images? If this is possible then why havn't they done it from the start. If you can get "real" colors then why have we built so much stuff that can only get fake color?

I smell fish.

reply to post by fieryjaguarpaw

The current rover(s) (goodbye Spirit *sniffle*) do not have camera filters which cover the full visible spectrum. Instead, they skip part of it and extend into the infrared spectrum. Also, the filters are quite narrow banded. Because of this it is impossible to produce a true color image, the only thing that can be done is a "best guess" at adjusting the color used to represent the infrared which is not visible to human eyes. For scientific purposes the true color is unimportant, much more information about the mineral composition of the the terrain can be discerned by using the infrared band.

The mastcams which will ride the MSL also have the narrow band filters (including infrared) but instead of the grayscale CCD's which are carried by the current rovers they use Bayer Pattern Filter CCD's, like those on consumer digital cameras. This allows one image to contain the full color data instead of combining the data from three (or more) images. There are tradeoffs, the resolution is not as good, pixel for pixel, but the mastcams CCD's also have more pixels on their CCD's.

I guess they listened to all the bitching. Not really, the specs were laid out in 2004, shortly after the current rovers landed. Hopefully the Mars orbiters will last long enough to provide sufficient bandwidth to handle the much greater amount of data which MSL will provide.


[edit on 5/2/2010 by Phage]

reply to post by fieryjaguarpaw


Most people ignored what was probably the closest to true colour photos from Mars, the photos taken by Phoenix's optical microscope camera, when using the red, green and blue LEDs to create an artificial white light that was perfectly known, making it much better than using the colour chart.

I don't expect a great difference between the future full spectrum colour photos when compared with the corrected photos from the rovers, but it will interesting to see.