Imagining Mars

Alumni give the world a preview of the Red PLanet

By Hoyt Coffee

As the Mars Pathfinder hurtled toward an Independance Day rendezvous with the Red PLanet, stargazers worlwide focused their attention on the arid orb en masse for the first time since the Viking missions of the 1970s. Millions tuned in to CNN, network news or the World Wide Web for a glimpse of Earth's nearby neighbor-their interest piqued by the recent discovery of possible fossils in a Martian meteor.

Their reward was a remarkably realistic preview of the lander slowing in the thin Martian atmosphere, the compact spacecraft dangling beneath a parachute canopy and the Pathfinder bounding across the rock-strewn landscape inside its blanket of shock-absorbing balloons.

It was a cutting-edge spectacle worthy of the world's pre eminent space agency, but it wasn't a product of the expansive labs and computer banks at NASA. This six minutes of ,amazing animation came from a company that only recently moved out of a Georgia Tech graduate's living room into modest digs in Roswell, Ga.

The Only Thing

Prior to the landing, when they weren't sending back the actual photographs, 90 percent of what NASA showed was our animation because that's really the only thing that they had, the only tool they had to educate the public on what was going to happen with this mission," said Robert F. Abbanat, MS AE '94, who co- founded Engineered Multimedia Inc. three years ago with former Tech Professor Kurt Gramoll, now the Hughes Professor of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma.

Mars "As an aerospace engineer, it was a tremendously gratifying experience to know that I've created something that is not only so widely viewed around the world, but has such a large impact in the aerospace community."

Created on a Macintosh computer using three-dimensional modeling software that mimics the motion-camera technique used in such films as "Star Wars," this latest project for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory took about three manmonths to complete. Abbanat and his six colleagues-four are Tech alunmi: Abbanat; Craig Pitts, AE '95; Jason Charlton, A '96; and Kelvin Raharja, AE '95- used Pathfinder mission profiles from JPL to create a storyboard that "highights the important aspects of the missio and becomes the blueprint for the animation."

Mars "We actually researched a lot of the photos that were sent back from the Viking missions back in 1976," Abbanat said. "We looked at artists' conceptions and other sources until we came up with what we thought it would look like. And surprisingly enough, we were pretty close."

Off and Running

n its brief existence, Engineered Multimedia has produced three animations for JPL: the six-minute sequence seen by millions; an eight-minute prequel to the Pathfinder animation; and a 20-minute, multimedia videotape preview of the upcoming Mars Surveyor probe,. a combination lander orbiter set for launch next year that will investigate soil and weather on Mars. The company is currently negotiating with JPL on a fourth project.

Engineered Multimedia also produces Internet sites (They created the site for Beers Construction), multimedia presentations and educational CDROMs, which gave the firm its start.

"When I was a master's student in aerospace engineering, I worked as a graduate research assistant in the aerospace engineering multimedia lab," Abbanat said. "Publishing companies became interested in some of the work we were doing, one of which was Addison- Wesley Publishers, and when I graduated in June of '94, they signed a deal with us to produce some interactive multimedia products. The grant money they gave us was basically the seed money for Engineered Multimedia."

It was during a trip with Kurt Gramoll to Pasadena, Calif., to promote the CDs that Abbanat picked up the first JPL contract. Gramoll was producing an interactive CD on space exploration for the laboratory's outreach program and stopped by to update the project director, Tony Spears.

Mars "He asked me if I'd be interested in producing an animation for the Mars Pathfinder mission. Of course, being an aerospace engineer I jumped at the opportunity," Abbanat said.

Getting Started

Engineered Multimedia has come a long way since its humble beginnings in the aerospace engineering multimedia lab, which itself began rather inauspiciously. A dedicated teacher, Gramoll "decided that multimedia was needed for education and started doing it." "I went out and wrote some grants; NSF funded some work of mine, so we established the lab and started putting stuff together," he said. The Mars product was an offshoot of a program to get elementary and high school students interested in the space program. Working with a group of Tech students, Gramoll attracted JPL:s attention through a contest to design a satellite berth for a Pluto mission.

"The students worked really hard and came up with some innovative designs," he said. "The Jet Propulsion Lab was just amazed at what they pulled off. They won the first prize: $5,000. Everybody was happy. I was a fun time, and they all got to buy their stereos.

"The Jet Propulsion Lab then turned my name over to the Mars group and said, 'Hey, Georgia Tech's doing some neat stuff. You should hook up with them and have them do your outreach program."' Armed with no more than some overhead transparencies, Gramoll began traveling to schools to talk up NASA, "and everybody was going to sleep."

"I thought, 'Something's got to change here.' So I said, 'Well, I've got this multimedia lab that I've been doing other work with. Why not make something fun out of this thing?"' About six months later, Gramoll had a multimedia presentation on a computer that he showed the students, and teachers began asking for copies of the program.

The Space Guide CD was born.

Mars Navigator

ver the next year, with money from JPL and the National Science Foundation, Gramoll and five undergraduate students put together the Mars Navigator CD, an interactive guide to the Pathfinder and Surveyor missions that Sky and Telescope magazine gave rave reviews. "That was just finished this last fall. So it's been out about a year now, and there have been more than 10,000 copies distributed," Gramoll said. With JPUs stock of the CD exhausted, Gramoll produced more with the help of Engineered Multimedia, which now handles distribution.