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Hollywood meets NASA on Mars mission
By LEONARD DAVID UPI Science News
 VANCOUVER,
British Columbia, Aug. 30 (UPI) - Tinseltown has been transplanted
and given a tinge of Martian red in Vancouver, with filming
in full swing for the big-budget movie, ""Mission to Mars"."
Among a cast of Hollywood actors-turned-astronauts
on this 55-acre plot of sand dunes converted to red planet
terra firma, are ex-space walkers, a Mars Pathfinder geologist,
and NASA's chief scientist for the International Space Station.
"This movie is a dramatically realistic
adventure story about human space flight, set in the year
2020. It is scientifically and technologically based on NASA
plans, but with a little Hollywood sizzle added," says Tom
Jacobson, producer of ""Mission to Mars"" and head of the
Jacobson Company based at Walt Disney Studios.
To be released next March by Touchstone
Pictures, the film is directed by Brian DePalma, with cast
members including Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Connie
Nielsen, and Jerry O'Connell.
Some details of the movie are veiled
in secrecy. But Jacobson explains that the film centers on
the first human sojourn to Mars some two decades into the
future. However, the Mars 1 crew meets a devastating and mysterious
disaster.
A second Mars mission is dispatched,
with the rescue team overcoming a host of dangers to find
out what happened to their colleagues, and search for survivors.
The film's hush-hush ending deals with an amazing discovery
on the red planet, one that is part high-drama, part inspirational
as to why humans explore, Jacobson said.
"We might push the science a bit here
and there, but the movie is really about the spirit of exploration,
and is meant to capture why we are meant to go on," Jacobson
said.
The expansive outdoor Mars set is under
construction, situated at the Fraser Sand Dunes, just south
of Vancouver. The Martian terrain is being sculpted by an
armada of technicians, bulldozers, cranes, and truck loads
of volcanic cinder rock and soil that is spray-tinted to match
the color of Mars' landscape. The reddish Martian sky, however,
will be massaged in by computer later on, accurately representing
the way Mars' atmosphere appears during different parts of
a day as the Sun sweeps by overhead.
"It's a spectacular site," said Matt
Golombek, the chief scientist of NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission
that touched down on the red planet in July 1997, then let
loose the Sojourner mini-rover. A consultant to the movie,
Golombek said that Pathfinder's success parked the film into
being. "This movie is because of Pathfinder. Without it there
would be no push to have a movie about Mars," "Golombek said.
"In many ways, Hollywood has done a
better job of popularizing space, even more than what NASA
itself is doing," Golombek said.
Dotted across the huge sandy set are
full-scale habitats, a greenhouse, and oxygen-production hardware
that represents a Mars base camp, and crafted from NASA designs.
"On Mars, you've got to live off the
land," Golombek said. "We know Mars has basically everything
you need to support life, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,
but it's just not in the right form right now. With the cold,
they are locked up in the minerals and rocks. So any way you
can manufacture some of these things will help lighten the
load of getting to Mars and stay there," he said.
A NASA veteran of over 30 years, ex-astronaut
Story Musgrave also serves as consultant to the film. Drawing
upon hours of his spacewalking experience, such as repairing
and servicing the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, Musgrave
is providing expertise in film scenes shot within sound stages
that picture zero-g live aboard a Mars-bound spaceship. Body
movements of actors have been carefully orchestrated to show
the beauty and instant grace of micro-gravity, Musgrave said.
Specially designed cables and harnesses
hooked to the actors help mimic the zero gravity environment
within one area of a spaceship in transit to Mars. Visual
effects specialists will later take out the cables during
final production to produce the free-floating feel of space.
"In my opinion, this is the best zero-g
ever created on Earth or in space. I think this is the most
beautiful stuff ever done," Musgrave said.
"The set is big, beautiful, and detailed,"
Musgrave said. "Technically, they have really done their homework."
NASA's Kathryn Clark, chief scientist
for the International Space Station now under actual construction
in Earth orbit, is a technical advisor to "Mission to Mars".
Clark said the multi-nation space complex now being built
is key to learning how to live and work in space for long
treks through space, such as future Mars missions that last
three years.
Knowing the physiological toll the
human body takes when exposed to zero-g, as well as artificial
gravity, is a top research duty of the International Space
Station, she said.
"At present, we do not have a program
to go to Mars," Clark said. "Building the space station is
the program we're working on right now. But we also know that
the main reason to build the International Space Station is
to eventually reach out. But is that reaching out to Mars,
back to the Moon, or to asteroids?" Those decisions are still
to be made, she said.
While roughly 200 movie makers, actors,
and technicians hustle about the "Mission to Mars" sets, fast
at work to finish filming this November, and keep within the
ballpark of a $100 million budget, the reality is that Mars
will be landed upon this year.
This December, the robotic Mars Polar
Lander is slated to soft-land an array of scientific gear
on the red planet. Mars researcher, Golombek, said that the
lander and other robotic craft to follow, will lead to humans
eventually trekking to the red planet.
"We are being drawn there because Mars
is special. It's not this lifeless moon that we've been to.
It's something about life. What is life? How does it get to
form? How frequent is it? That's the mystery," he said.
Copyright 1999 by United Press International
All rights reserved.
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