Celestia Forums

Hi folks:

Finally, after lots of manipulation and tweaking, I am pleased to release the long awaited Celestia Educational Activity, the Terraforming of Mars. The Activity takes you to the 26th century and beyond to a time when man begins to terraform the surface of Mars, preparing it for colonization. As you journey through 1000 years of time, you will see Mars transformed from a dry, cold, lifeless world to a terraformed planet with shallow seas, oxygen atmosphere, plants and vast human colonies spread across its surface.

The work showcases the incredible talents of Don Edwards, Jack Higgins and Grant Hutchinson.

In response to my request for some textures to use, Don went all out and prepared a set of 19 complete transitional textures for Mars, showing it change from what it is today to a flooded, green world with colonies. He not only created amazing surface textures, but also bump textures, night textures and cloud textures for each segment in time. Here are just two screenshots of his amazing work:



A fully terraformed Mars

and ...



showing Mars in transition. Notice the ring of eight giant mirrors in space beyond Mars.

As a result of very impressive research by Grant, Jack, Selden, myself and others on the forum, we developed the Activity on the basis of an engineering plan to terraform Mars by melting the polar ice caps with huge mirrors in space, over the course of hundreds of years. There are several good papers on the subject published on the web. The combined efforts of several people had to be tapped to bring this to fruition in the Activity. First, we had to design the mirrors. Grant, Jack and I worked up a great model and Jack Higgin's exceptional talents designed a great 3ds model for the mirrors. It was then Grant's challenge to position the mirrors in space in such a way that they reflected sunlight directly onto the North and South poles of Mars (at least some of the orbital year). We also realized that to keep them on station, steering rockets could not be used (the mirrors are too large and flexible). Rather, orbiting lasers would have to be used to turn, adjust and steer the mirrors. Again, Jack and Grant came through with great designs, positioned to adjust the angle and orbit of each mirror.

The result is spectacular. Here are just two screenshots of the mirrors and lasers in use in space. The photo above shows them from Mars.







We even have video animation. A fantastic home movie with sound, taken from the surface of Mars which documents changes to the planet over 1000 years, has been custom designed for me for this Activity by David Smallwood of First Inspired, LTD in England. Here is a screenshot from it, showing the "Celestia Biodome" located in the Hellus crater.


The good news is that we think you will thoroughly enjoy taking this journey into the future of Mars. The bad news is that this Activity was a bear to get ready for download. It is very large (over 110 MB) and has to be downloaded from my website in eight (8) separate zip files. Each needs to be unzipped into the Celestia folder directly. They will install themselves into the extras folder. Make sure to read the instruction file in zip file A.

Because of their size, please be considerate in downloading. My website is being hosted on a friend's business server and it is in use a lot, particularly during the day. My webpage is a "lower" priority usage so when the server is in use for other things, downloads from my page will go slowly or be interrupted. If you have a dial-up modem, this Activity may simply be too big to try downloading, unless you schedule it for late at night.

One last point. In use, Celestia will draw a total of 32 separate models in space where the mirrors and lasers are (each mirror set has 4 3ds models associated with it). You may find that if you do not have a good Nvidia card or one with lots of Video RAM, Celestia may lock up in trying to draw all of the mirror meshes. You'll just have to try it out.

I want to thank Don Edwards, Grant Hutchinson and Jack Higgins for their contributions to this Activity. It could not have been designed without them.

Get the Activity on my website at :
Frank
http://www.fsgregs.org/celestia

I am also releasing a new Activity, just completed, titled the Spacecraft of Celestia. Part 1 will tour 18 of the craft in orbit near Earth, explaining what they are, why and how they got launched, what their accomplishments were/are, etc. Part 2 will cover the spacecraft beyond Earth, including some of the great fictional ones we have added to Celestia (Captain Kirk, here we come!!). Look for these activities also on my website..

Enjoy.

You guys are just incredible...
I wonder if, after having taken the activity, I will be in the assumption that it really is the 26th century (and I am on Mars..)
Starting download now..

Don, Jack, Grant and Frank: thanks in advance!

Paul

Ahem.
I'm willing to take responsibility for pretty much anything, but I really need you all to know I tried hard to talk Frank out of those damn' light beams shining through the vacuum.

I really, really tried.

Honest.

Grant

Obviously the fog is due to all the comets they've been smashing into the planet.

selden wrote:Obviously the fog is due to all the comets they've been smashing into the planet.

I reckoned at the time it might be a fine aerosol of dandruff generated by the amount of head-scratching that went into that one. Anyone who enjoys this sort of thing may care to marvel at the way we assemble several parts of the various 3ds models actually in the scc definition, so that we can build emissive and non-emissive components into the same model within Celestia.

Grant

Very nice work to all. Quite beatuiful surface texture work...

I'll be looking to download a copy when the initial rush is through...

I happen to own one of the copies of Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments by Martyn J. Fogg, which while out of print, seems to be the most comprehensive survey of the subject. As you might imagine, it
is about 50% devoted to projects applicable to the red planet, including
the polar solar sails idea. My favorite speculative technology from it is filling tubes hundreds of km long with deuterium/tritium deep in the regolith and setting off a fission trigger at one end - hydrogen bomb explosive cord! - melt the ice trapped in the regolith (surface heating won't quite work) and create canals (finally!) at once. Any real terraforming might pass on that, but directed cometfalls, chloroflurocarbon plants (superb greenhouse gasses if you don't mind the UV), and decreasing the polar albedo by transporting dust from the lavaplains to the poles will all be part...

Curious that you should be using lasers for position adjustment. Many recent solar sail designs (including a recent one by the Canadian Space Agency) simply use a 'counterweight' on an arm, which when displaced from the line between Sun to the center of the sail, achieve their own
angular accelleration. Others simply permit one or several of the radial mirror segments to fall away from the sun, getting angular force thereby before the segment is reeled taut again....

Well it is great to here that this activity has finally come to fruition. So I guess it is time for me to get some of the 8k versions of these Mars textures ready for download so that they can get plugged in if the user wishes. Hey its better than them just sitting on my hard drive doing nothing.

Don. Edwards

Don. Edwards wrote:Well it is great to here that this activity has finally come to fruition. So I guess it is time for me to get some of the 8k versions of these Mars textures ready for download so that they can get plugged in if the user wishes. Hey its better than them just sitting on my hard drive doing nothing.

Don. Edwards

I'd very much welcome that Don.
Mars is definitely the planet that needs a high res texture.

Paul

Hello Frank, Don, Grant, Jack...

I am now charging this * formidable * work (I am a large amateur of Mars... and novels by KS Robinson), well on I reduces certain textures because my old computer can't read textures of more than 2k, before being able to make turn this great activity.
I have a idiot question, excuses me: splendid Martian textures seem haven't the same basic orientation as that in Celestia (v131-1)
What is the good orientations?
That made curious whith locations actived: -)
cordially, Jeam

Yep! It's true! Grant did try HARD to talk me out of the light beams in space. In the end, I felt it would be OK to have "something" to see bouncing off the mirrors toward Mars.

For the purists out there, you can remove the beams by simply commenting out the entries in the Terraforming Mars.ssc file. Simply locate the "Beam alone.3ds" entries and delete them or comment them out. There are eight of them, one for each mirror.

Alternatively, I have a dimmer beam 3ds mesh available. Jack did it for me when he was designing the mirrors. The beam is not so obvious. I can e-mail it to any who want it, or I can put it onto my website as a stand-alone file.

Regarding the alignment of the Mars maps with the locations map, I will leave that to Don to comment on. Don designed the textures this past summer, when the Mars longitude maps were oriented differently from today.

Regards,

Frank

Frank,

Fantastic to finally see this activity online!

I won't get to download it for a little while though- Internet Cafe required for this one! Before my arm falls off from typing (see my other posts today or my website homepage for details) I'd just like to say well done (claps on the back all round lads ) to everyone involved in the project- to frank, for coming up with the concept originally- (this was supposed to be the first activity, wasn't it?), to grant, for his amazing work on the positioning (WAY over my head- especially the models-within-models), and to don, who (from what i heard!) went through hell trying to get these textures made.

I think i'll make the mirror/laser models available for seperate download too...

Well done everybody...it sure looks great...I will be downloading this one!

Regards...bh.

AuReality wrote:You guys are just incredible...
I wonder if, after having taken the activity, I will be in the assumption that it really is the 26th century (and I am on Mars..)

Guess what?
I really was on Mars. And it really was the 26th century, or thereabouts. The mirrors however did not float in space above Mars, but were anchored on very high pillars of stone on the surface of Mars, high enough to let the mirror reflections reach the poles (I guess that must have been really high).
And Mars was inhabited by a repressing dinosaur force..

In short: I had a most fantastic dream.
Probably triggered by doing the Terraform activity the night before. The things Celestia can bring about..

So I did the activity. And I must say: this is fantastic work Frank & companions! It is very enjoyable and educational.
Though I did not conclude it yet (I will do so tonight) here are some remarks:

1. I did not know of the idea of melting the icecaps beforehand, and I must say it is a very intriguing idea! Technically of course it is a very challenging thing to do, but I imagine it really can be done. This is sci-fi with the emphasis on sci instead of fi as with many other ideas. Accepting the idea that man once may live on Mars changes one's view of the future dramatically.

2. The Mars textures are great! So much more detail than with the standard texture. Olympus Mons now really looks like a mountain instead of an unsharp smudge. Thank you Don!
A question though: you made Mars a lot less red than it is now in Celestia. Is your texture based n http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2001/24/ or similar images?
To put it differently: is the standard Mars texture in Celestia too red?

3. There is an error in the activity: when you are linked to a view of Mars that should show the light shining on the south pole, it's not there. Also the human colonies are lacking. It appears that the .CEL url sets the time for this view too early. When I progress in time, the view is correct.

4. For a reason I can not lay my hands on, the Mars artistic impression movie is very humoristic. Maybe it's the kind of details like the person with the flashlight... Anyway it is a nice companion to the Celestia features of this activity. The Valles Marineris flyover is nice as well.

5. I am thinking of accompanying the activity with a .CEL script that shows the highlights of the activity. Would you welcome that idea?

6. If wanted, I can write out my Mars dream of tonight..


Again, thanks for this very nice activity!

Paul

I'm sorry to bump an old topic, but I'm having a bit of trouble D/Ling this addon. Downloads G through to H time out about halfway no matter what I try. Does anyone have any way to remedy this problem, including reliable download managers?

DM.

Hi Guest:

The time-out is due to the fact that my webpage host does lots of broadband work on the computer that my page runs on, and his work always takes priority. For some reason which I don't understand, a download manager is not working to resume downloads.

Try downloading at another time ... perhaps in the morning while you are getting ready for work. His activities may be at a lower level and it will go through OK then. Let me know what happens.

Regards,

fsgregs

Is the addon still available? I keep getting this :

"The page cannot be displayed"

K.

Dear Kurgen:

Yep, the site was down for some reason. We didn't even know it. Its fixed now and is back on line. YOu can download fine now.

Thanks.

Frank G

Excellent!

Thanks for the reply Frank.

K.

Ooops! forgot to login...

K.

Cant launch celestia thru the Doc. Not with WordReader, Word or OpenOffice. Tries to open a web -page (using opera). Any good ideas?