334 Term Project Proposal
Thomas Aloi
thomas.aloi@stonybrook.edu
Title:
“The Perseverance”
Synopsis:
On February 18, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance mission was successful. The Perseverance rover landed on Mars’ Jezero Crater. Tasked with the monumental mission of looking for signs of past life within collected samples. It is also trying to discover habitable environments for humans on Mars and prepare the planet for human life. The Perseverance rover contains a lot of innovative technology to scan its surroundings and collect samples integral to understanding the environment on Mars such as the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), which can convert CO2 from Mars’ atmosphere to a small amount of oxygen, and SHERLOC, which is a spectrometer that can detect organic compounds within samples, among other instruments. The Perseverance mission could be the first big step to sustaining human life on Mars and deserves to be documented through animation.
Objective:
The video will use 3D graphics animations to animate the 2021 Perseverance landing while giving a brief history of the mission in a documentary-like fashion. It will break down the internal and external components of the rover using a detailed 3D model of the rover. For audio, the video will use original music as well as the audio of the official landing.
Audience:
The audience of this animation would be high school or undergraduate students with an interest in space exploration or physics.
Sources:
General info page about the mission, showing high-quality images of each part of the spacecraft that transported the Perseverance rover.
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/overview/
High-quality rotatable model of the rover for an accurate reference
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/
Official footage broadcast from the Perseverance rover landing will be used for audio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg
Diagram showing the main instruments attached to the rover
