Mission to Mars

China just launched a robotic mission to Mars. I anticipated this mission! I made a short video a couple years ago for my conversational Mandarin class about a trip to mars. You can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqpdEFnbeoM

Here is a report about the real mission. I hope they will be happier than I was.

https://www.space.com/china-tianwen-1-mars-mission-launch.html

 

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Some Baby Steps on "Red Star Flyby"

I am still not getting things done very fast. I don't think I have that much more I can do on it. There are too many interesting things on the Internet.
 

I modified one of the planets to give it some clouds. I'm not really a cloud making kind of guy. I hope it looks better with the clouds.

I’ve added a soundtrack. NASA turned some of the signals they picked up from probes they sent to other planets into audio files.  Some of them sound quite "spacy", so I used them. They’re also in the public domain. I've listened to it several times but haven't decided if I want to add more sounds. I’ve thought of adding some “computer” beeps or a burst of telemetry sound.

Earlier I created some short clips of the probe approaching the star connected by dissolves to give a better sense of the distances. I wanted to add something similar at the end. As I worked on this, I decided that the clips I added at the start were not right. It me quite a bit of time to rethink what they should look like. Then it took a long time to make the changes to the Blender animation. I think I have the inbound video the way I like it now. I started on the outbound videos, but I’m not done yet.

Little changes seemed to get bigger and bigger as you work on them. This is a common problem. I doubt I’ll ever be satisfied with the animation, but at some point I’ll have to call it finished.

After I get the all the video cleared up, I want to add some on-screen captions to give some information on what is being shown. I haven’t given too much thought to that yet.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Red Star Fly-by

I was fascinated by the Breakthrough Starshot Project to send a probe to another star system. They think it will take 20 years to develop the technology, 20 to 30 years to make the trip, and 4 years to send the pictures back. By then, my age will be triple digits and I just might not be around to see it. So, I decided to create my own version of what it might look like.

I started the animation earlier this year but got distracted with other things. This week I got back to work on it. It is a simulation of what a space probe flying through an exo-stellar system would see. I used the animation program Blender.

I created mini star system in Blender. I tried to make it to scale, so the distances and plant/star sizes were appropriate. I did make the planets on the large side, so they’d show up better. I created a path for the probe and created a camera that followed the route. I had to go back to my old geometry skills to work it out. Wikipedia was very valuable.

I'd dropped it mainly because I had trouble getting the camera to point where I wanted it to point. If the probe was travelling at 20% the speed of light, it would pass through the system is about 7 minutes. At 24 frames a second, that worked out to 10710 frames. To save time, I just specified positions and orientations for only about 30 frames and let Blender interpolate the others. The interpolations were kind of wonky.

I went back and recalculated the positions and orientations for about every 48 frames, or about 190 frames. When the probe was changing direction, or rotating faster, I used shorter time intervals. For the most part it works OK now, although there are a few glitches I need to fix. Some of the interpolations are strange. I don’t understand why.

I created a star scape back ground to make it look more realistic. That took me several tries to get right. I did a test run to see how it looks. I feel good about it.

I have some other changes I’d like to make. My artistic skills leave something to be desired, so I used images of various planets and moons in our solar system. Some of them are too recognizable, so I want to find a way to make something a little more alien. I don’t know how I will do that yet.

I also want to add a few moons to the system. Mainly to help illuminate the dark sides of some planets so they’re more visible.

I hope to get this done quickly, before I get side tracked again.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog