Award-Winning ‘Good Night Oppy’ Roves Around Mars With Heroic, Human-Like Robot Geologists
deadline.comSteven Spielberg has been known to explore science fiction in many of his films, like Minority Report, E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
But his company Amblin rockets into science fact with Good Night Oppy, a documentary about NASA’s 2003 mission to send rovers to Mars to look for signs that water once flowed on the Red Planet.
Amblin approached Ryan White to direct the film, a wise choice given not only his skill as a director but his affection for the subject matter. “I’m a space geek,” White tells Deadline. “So, I had followed these missions myself.” NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched two rovers to Mars within weeks of each other — first Spirit and then Opportunity (the “Oppy” of the title).
White documents the maniacally tight deadline faced by engineers designing the rovers; they needed to get the vehicles ready to go for the moment when the orbits of Earth and Mars aligned most closely, otherwise the mission would have to wait another two years for the next window of Opportunity (so to speak).
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