Behind JPL’s ‘7 Minutes of Terror’ video on risky rover landing
By Jon Bardin
July 12, 2012 12 AM
LOS ANGELES TIMES
At Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada-Flintridge, experts are gearing up for the Mars rover Curiosity to touch down on the red planet at 10:31 p.m. on Aug. 5. But not everyone at JPL who’s supporting the mission is a planetary scientist or aerospace engineer. Arguably, the coolest job at the lab belongs to John Beck, the filmmaker behind the “7 Minutes of Terror” video that is one of the most-watched offerings on
YouTube.
The video is fast-paced and set to dramatic music. One of the featured lab employees is engineer Adam Steltzner, who explains that it takes seven short minutes for the rover to travel from the outer atmosphere of Mars to the dusty Martian surface and 14 long minutes for a signal from the rover to reach Earth from Mars. So, Steltzner says soberly, “when we first get word that we’ve touched the top of the atmosphere, the vehicle has been alive, or dead, on the surface for at least seven minutes.” Cut to black. Cue swelling music.
Many viewers have expressed surprise that such a high-quality video was produced by NASA, which has a reputation for an overly dry communications strategy focused on facts and figures rather than people and stories. But Beck has been turning out compelling videos for JPL since the late 1990s. He contributed footage to Nova’s one- hour features “Mars Dead or Alive?” (2004) and “Welcome to Mars,” (2005), the IMAX documentary “Roving Mars,” (2006) and National Geographic’s Emmy-winning documentary “Five Years on Mars,” (2008) all of which cover JPL’s various rover missions.
For “7 Minutes,” Beck shot all the footage, composed all the music, directed the movie –- and produced it to boot. He said he wanted to convey to viewers that the mission is risky and the potential for failure is high—a sure reason for people to tune in for the main event in August.
“I really wanted people to get the sense that, you know, this mission is really crazy,” Beck said in an interview. “It’s almost comical how crazy it is. And I really wanted to make the engineers seem vulnerable.”
Beck, whose childhood hero was Neil Armstrong, said his goal is to bring a sense of wonder and humanity back to NASA. After the golden age of famous astronauts, Beck says, NASA “became generic and faceless, and it was just all about what a great job NASA does. But people want to see the space jockeys.” Given JPL’s mission to explore the solar system robotically, its scientists and engineers have become those space jockeys.
Beck was low on the JPL totem pole in 1998 when the Mars Pathfinder mission was gearing up. He proposed making a documentary about the mission, and the mission’s program director approved. The resulting 35-minute film, “The Pathfinders,” won gold at the 1999 Chicago International Film Festival. The film humanized the Pathfinder engineers, chronicling their successes and failures as they prepared for and carried out the mission. “That was what got this whole thing going,” he said.
Since then, Beck has made numerous short films for JPL, many of which are available on his YouTube page (linked here), or on JPL’s YouTube page. He is particularly proud of “The Martians,” a series of beautiful short documentaries that detail JPL research and the scientists behind it, including the development of the rover’s parachute. The entire series can be seen here.
Beck detects more than a hint of irony when he hears complaints that NASA does not do a good job of communicating publicly. “When I started here back in the ‘90s, we were specifically told not to do things that were cool, because back then people complained that we were making entertainment with tax dollars. Now we’re hearing the opposite.”
He is also surprised at how much attention the video has gotten –- more than 590,000 views on YouTube as of Thursday -- in comparison to other online work he’s done for JPL. “I’ve gotten kind of jaded by now because every now and then I make a video and think it’s going to be great, but then nobody sees it,” he said. “With this one, I don’t know why it finally caught on. I think it was the suspense — it feels a lot like ‘Mission: Impossible.’”
By Phil Plait June 26, 20127:00 AM
This. Is. AWESOME! How the bat-guano crazy engineers at NASA and JPL are going to land the Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars:
Holy crap. NASA, throw lots more money at the production company that made this video! You want to excite the public? They did it right.
Now think about this: the rover weighs – get this – 890 kilograms, nearly a ton. The Mars air is thick enough that engineers have to deal with it, but too thin to bring Curiosity all the way to the surface safely. So they need a heat shield to slow it initially, a parachute to brake even more, and then rocket motors to drop it the rest of the way.
Craziness. But no worse, I suppose, than using a bouncy ball made of airbags to protect it, like Spirit and Opportunity used (Curiosity is way too heavy to use that method of landing). It’s funny– landing on Mars is harder than getting stuff back to Earth from space, or landing on the Moon. Our air is thick enough to make it relatively simple to slow something down enough for a comfortable landing, and since the Moon has no air, you just use rockets the whole way.
But you know what? I think they’ll do it, and this’ll work. Why? Because they’ve landed probes on Mars before. Many times. We hear a lot of about failed attempts to get to Mars, but in fact JPL and NASA have done an amazing job of getting ever-increasingly sophisticated probes down to the surface of the Red Planet. Heck, Spirit and Opportunity were only supposed to work for a nominal period of 90 days, but Spirit kept going for over six years, and Opportunity is still going strong after more than eight years!
Curiosity is due to land on August 6, 2012, at 05:31 UTC. That’s before midnight in Boulder, so I plan on staying up and watching. I missed most of the fun stuff for the SpaceX mission to the space station because it all happened in the middle of the night, so it’ll be great to finally watch another space event live. This will be very exciting, and I’ll post more info here as I hear it.