New Mars

We interview Kees Veenenbos, a computer programmer who transforms the raw binary code from Mars Orbiter spacecraft into beautiful vistas of the red planet - or not so red, in some cases…

	Kees Veenenbos (right) and Pascal Lee

I discovered Kees Veenenbos’ work by accident, really. Seeking inspiration for a newmars.com article on Olympus Mons, I used the excellent Google search engine’s Image option to look for pictures of the mighty volcano. The search returned the usual Viking views, some MGS shots and several familiar pieces of space art. But the picture that caught my eye was a digital image, a 3D rendering of the great volcano bathed in the golden glow of a Martian sunset, casting a shadow behind it. When I clicked on the thumbnail, enlarging it to fill my screen, the full-size image literally took my breath away, and my quest was forgotten as I went onto the artist’s own website… It was like entering an Aladdin’s Cave of Martian wonders. Looking at those renders I was there, I was flying above Mars, over its canyons, craters and valleys! Some of the landscapes were in natural martian colours, reds, tans and golds. Others showed an ancient Mars, a living Mars, of sparkling blue water, lush fields of green algae, the hints of forests…

I looked at those pictures and I know it’s a cliche, but I swear I felt a shiver run up my spine. Finally, I thought, someone has brought Mars to life.

Ever since then I’ve been a huge fan of Kees’ work, and he has even, very generously, helped me bring my own part of Mars to life (Excursion to Ganges) by rendering one particular crater in Ganges Chasma which has always intrigued me. And to my delight Kees’ work is now receiving worldwide attention, and acclaim, after being profiled on the Space.com website!

I thought New Mars readers might like to know a little more about the artist who, perhaps more than any other digital artist working today, is showing us how Mars once looked, how it looks now - and how it might look in the future.

Misty sunrise over Olympus Mons

New Mars: Kees… first of all, why Mars? Why not the Moon or Venus? Has Mars always been an interest of yours?

Kees Veenenbos: Mars has always been a planet that seems to be near us as human beings. Over the last few years some probes have made it to the planet and sent us new images and information about Mars. The main attraction for me was that the Mars Global Surveyor has an instrument on board that measures the elevations of the entire planet. We don’t have such detailed height maps now of Venus and the Moon. Photos had already suggested that Mars might have known liquid water once, and where there’s water there might have been a possible start of life. Those questions have not been answered yet. To discover some proof of channels on all kind of places on the surface of Mars and visualize them while rendering was the biggest challenge.

NM: Have any particular books - or indeed people - inspired your own personal fascination with Mars?

Kees: In general you could say that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur’s C. Clark’s 2001 A Space Odyssey inspired me when I was about 17 years old. And Mars, well not any specific people, particulary. Strangely enough, the information on the internet inspires me the most. It’s all in the news lately: the different missions to Mars from the past, present and future. The Odyssey probe will start its mission in about a month to look for ice and water reservoirs below the surface on Mars. This is an exiting mission. And in 2003 the Mars Express (ESA) and the Mars Exploration Mission (NASA) will follow to explore the planet.

Fesenkov crater in the past

NM: Can you describe, as simply as possible, how you make such beautiful pictures out of raw spacecraft data?

Kees: At the start, when I discovered the data of the MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, one of the instruments of the Mars Global Surveyor) I had to figure out how I could convert the data to a model that I could use with Terragen, a landscape generator which I use to make realistic landscapes. NASAView is such a viewer that shows the data as a grey-scale map. Black is the lowest level, white the highest. The map can be saved as a gif file. The limitation of a greyscale model is that there are only 256 values of grey that can be saved. The gif file can’t be imported in Terragen. The image has to be saved as bitmap and then to be converted with a converter bmp2ter or Terrify to a terrain map for Terragen. Now all this work can be done and in a better way by the new version of the viewer 3DEM of Richard Horne. This viewer imports the MOLA directly and can be saved as ter-file in a blink of an eye. It can be saved as a cylindrical or cosine model.

After the conversion the ter-file can be imported in Terragen. Then the ‘work’ starts with choosing an interesting part on the map and find the right parameters for the camera position, a surface map, the atmosphere, the Sun and water level and colours if needed.

NM: How long does it take you to create an image?

Kees: Because I have to make sometimes hundreds of changes before I am satisfied with the result, it can take a few hours to a week before I release an image. And sometimes, a few days or weeks later, I make a new and better version.

	Olympus Mons and Tharsis Montes in the past

NM: Your Mars renderings show Mars as it once was, and how it is now. Which do you prefer, the ‘warm and wet’ Green Mars, or the ‘cold and dry’ Red Mars?

Kees: It’s tantalizing to imagine how Mars once could have been. An article in Science in November 1999 suggested that terraces found in the northern basin (Vastitas Borealis) were actually the shores of a vast ancient ocean. That’s why I started to make a planet Mars with water. And anybody can see the canyons that were shaped by large quantities of water, for example the Kasei Valles. The life that I brought in was speculative, but I suggested that if there was water for a long period that life in a primitive form might have been developed. It’s even possible that life started first on Mars and then was ‘exported’ to Earth, or vice versa. We have to wait for real proof once we have explored the planet and brought back samples with a sample return mission. The actual situation can be observed on a daily basis with the thousands of photographs that were made by the numerous probes and satellites which were sent to Mars. I can’t do any better then those detailed shots. The MOLA data resolves features down to about 600 meters. That’s not enough to go into detail.

NM: Your renders of Mars are essentially time machines - they allow us to look back in time, to when rivers and oceans existed on Mars, but also to leap forwards in time to see how a terraformed Mars might look. What are your own feelings about terraforming? And have they changed during the course of your work?

Kees: I don’t see us terraforming Mars. Why should we terraform Mars? It would be exciting but it will take hundred thousands of years to bring Mars to life. And what kind of life? Are we exporting all life from the earth? I know that there is much discussion about it, but we haven’t even made it to Mars. We have to explore the planet first. And be cautious that we don’t contaminate Mars before we really know Mars thouroughly. Terraforming is no priority. There is still so much to do on planet Earth…

	Valles Marineris

NM: In this digital age, do you think there’s still a place for traditional paint-on-canvas space art? Did any particular space artists inspire you in the past?

Kees: I know of some very good artists. Like Bonestell, Don Davis, Adolf Schaller or Pat Rawlings. And of course there is a place for that kind of space art. I don’t consider my renders as real ‘art’. They are visualizations with realistic and speculative elements. And sometimes they are beautiful and dramatic, so people seem to consider them sometimes as art… The real inspiration is the possibility that with the help of the elevation model that you can stand on any place on Mars and so be somewhere where no one has gone before. It’s a virtual ‘being there’ but that’s a part of the imagination.

NM: Leaving aside the internet and graphic art for a moment, how do you feel when you see Mars depicted in movies?

Kees: I haven’t seen good movies that visualize Mars in a realistic way. For example in ‘Total Recall’ Mars plays an important role, but I didn’t recognise Mars from the scenes. But this movie is placed in the future, so it could be that Mars will look like that?

NM: Your work is undeniably beautiful, but it is also scientifically accurate, based as it is on data from spaceprobes. Have any NASA scientists commented on your work? And is there any chance of your work playing a role in future Mars exploration plans?

Kees: As far as the elevations are concerned, the images are more or less accurate, especially those that I converted with the new version of 3DEM. I took the colours for the surface maps from photographs of the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor. But as great a part is a visualization of 3,5 to 4 billion years ago I had to use my imagination. That’s why I used a lot of different settings, like warm and wet, but also landscapes with a lot of ice and snow. Members of the MOLA team like Dave Smith and Maria Zuber congratulated me more than once with my work and granted me a link on their MOLA page ‘relevant links’. Maria Zuber admitted that they never envisioned that the data could be used for this kind of images. They use the the data in a scientific way. I used it for a different creative and artistic interpratations and it worked well out. That’s some recognition I think. However I don’t know if my work can contribute to exploration plans.

Kasei Valles in the past

NM: There are three galleries on your website, and more to come, I know. Which is your own personal favourite image to date, and why?

Kees: There are a lot that I like, but the renderings of the Kasei Valles on the second page belong to my favourites, because they show clearly the meandering path of the water that came through this valley once. It’s proof that large quantities of water and mud came from the Tharsis region and violently eroded the surface of Mars once.

NM: Is there one render you have in your mind - a scene you really want to see brought to life - that you are wanting to work on in the near future?

Kees: I am working now on Mars Exploration Rover landing sites 2003. That’s not an easy one because of the lack of detail that I encounter in the elevation models. I would like to have more detail, but there’s no more… :) I want to render them in natural colours, but these colours are difficult to assess. So this is a challenge once more. One of the landing sites is the Gusev Crater. That’s a crater were the scientist expect to find answers about water and life in the sediments. I think that’s one of the favourite spots I will work on. I’ll visualisize it as it is now and in the past with water. This is also a difficult one. The photos from MGS show a lot of detail, details that I miss in the elevation model.

NM: Having rendered your amazing short animations, do you ever think there might be a role for you in full length film-making? Or even science documentaries?

Kees: Rendering these images and film-making is not my daily occupation. So I don’t think that I can play a role in film-making. I’ll continue to make animations for pleasure. In that way I’ll be independant from scripts, cameramen and ‘directors’.. :). But if somebody asks me? I was asked to deliver some backrounds for a StarWars fanmovie. But that’s not at all certain that I can contribute to it.

NM: If you could snap your fingers and go to Mars right now, in person, and reappear in any place, where would it be, and why?

Kees: Any place? Well if I was asked to come along… I think one of the valleys in the Valles Marineris. May be the Melas Chasma with its splended views on the canyon walls. Or look around at one of the places where probes landed and see for example the Mars Pathfinder site with my own eyes.. Twin Peaks in the background, I’d like to climb it!

	The Orcus Patera, an extreme oval crater

NM: Now that your work has been brought to the attention of the world through New Mars and Space.com, do you hope it will help increase public interest in the red planet and exploration of it?

Kees: I don’t know if my renders contribute to increase the public interest in Mars. I consider them as visualisations of Mars in the past. They give a push to the imagination to people. While I was working on them I was sometimes surprised and felt like being there. Was Mars like that? Really? I ask me those questions often myself. I’ll have to answer myself that it’s an imaginary view of just one man.

NM: What are your plans for the future?

Kees: I’ll continue to make renderings. I haven’t been everywhere on Mars yet… so many places to see and to bring to life… I make also animations. I made 13 minutes of animations for the 1st European Mars Convention in Paris (September 2001). For the next convention in The Netherlands next September I’ll make some more. It’s a hell of a job, because it takes days to render a sequence of just minute, but it’s worth it.

NM: What about rendering images of other bodies in the Solar System? I can’t help thinking how amazing it would be to have the huge ice cliffs of Miranda, or Mimas’ enormous crater Herschel brought to life by you

Kees: The only thing I need is an elevation model and inormation about the circumstances of the celestial bodies. I would like to have good models of the Moon, but detailed ones are not existant strange enough. And there are enough moons around the planets that wait to be visualized in a realistic way. But there are no probes in the neighbourhood. We’ll have to wait for them and that could take some years as most attention is focused on Mars now. But I don’t complain: Mars has many secrets to be unveiled.

NM: Kees, thanks very much for talking to New Mars!

Visit Kees’ website at http://home-1.worldonline.nl/~veenen/terragen/mars/mars.html. All images used in this article are Copyright Kees Veenenbos, and are used with permission. Stuart Atkinson conducted this interview.

Filed under: Interviews on January 18th, 2002