Roving Mars

Great for the whole family
We saw a clip of this video at the National Air & Space Museum--my kids, ages 3 and 5, were riveted! We searched the gift shop for the video but were disappointed that it had not yet been released. Several weeks later I came across it quite by accident on TV and taped it for my older son, who loves outer space and has been fascinated by Mars and the rovers since our trip to the museum. Most general audience space documentaries do not keep his attention, but he loved this one. The narration is almost conversational, not your typical dry, boring voiceover. The video is informative enough for adults and yet still accessible for kids. The images are amazing, no matter what your age. I look forward to adding this video to our collection so I can stop fast-forwarding the commercials on our tape!

This Exit: Mars Toll: Twenty-Bucks
I don't know how anyone could rate this film lower than five stars; unless they watched the film on a cheap TV with a small screen. `Roving Mars' on blu-ray blew me away by the quality of the IMAX HD cinematography focusing on the manufacturing of the rovers. I was captivated by a realistic depiction of what it takes to get a spacecraft to make a 300 million mile hole-in-one landing.

I had read a review on Netflix where the wannabe critique stated that they didn't like all the CGI; they probably didn't know that some of the extraordinary footage of the mars terrain was actual footage from the HD-quality cameras on-board the rovers. It might have helped the common laymen if the filmmakers had indicted where the CGI stopped and the actual footage from mars began. I've been so engrossed by the rover missions (NASA made all the rover stills, panoramas and video available for download to the public, ever since the missions began [...]) I knew when I was when observing actual...

Too Diluted
I'm very excited about science and engineering. We can't take for granted the courage and brilliance it took NASA and its contractors to design, implement, and deploy the equipment for this mission, then exercise the robots for this mission. And they did it all for less than what we pay for a baseball stadium!

This 40-minute film is disappointing, however. It's short on science; there is no discussion of the launch planning, the path of the rover as it travels to Mars, or any interesting facts. What is its weight? How did the timing work? How did the engineers design the rover, and measure its performance? What materials were used in its implementation? What diagnostics did it have? How much power did it use? What challenges were involved in surviving the harsh Martian atmosphere, its cold, the dust, and its chemistry?

The questions I have are simple, and endless. This film addressed none of them, I'm afraid. Worse, as others have pointed out, there's very little...

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