When the screenings were over, I left with an enormous feeling of pride that our spacecraft and the scientists and engineers who work on them have produced maps and images of such quality that an entire simulated planet, spread out on the vast expanse of an IMAX screen, can be so instantly familiar. Well done, Mars community.

I needed to find out more about the process by which the visual-effects artists produced those scenes, and how they were so instantly recognizable. Did they actually use a topographic data set and a 3D model?

I was granted an interview with visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman, and I asked him. It turned out to be more traditional art than engineery simulation, just working from great images of Mars (“Google is always a visual-effects supervisor’s best friend,” he said, and I laughed, not admitting that it’s a science writer’s best friend, too). He went on to explain that what makes the images so realistic is an attention to the details that aren’t necessarily visible. “Ultimately, those fine details that you may not necessarily see probably will be represented somehow in the texture that you would see in a wider shot.” Which is super, because what’s helped scientists understand Mars so much better now than we did 20 years ago is how we have all these overlapping data sets that document the planet at every scale from global to the extremely local, and clearly the same thing has benefited space artists.

For Zimmerman, making Mars so realistic was important to please fans. “In Star Trek, we really do try and honor the science of things because I think the fans specifically do care about those things, maybe more than some other sci-fi franchises. It’s a little daunting because it’s something that people know. So for us it was really just about doing a ton of research. As much as we could find—realistic images, photos, recreations and all of that, and then piecing it together to create the most faithful representation that we could. We definitely wanted Mars to be recognizable, and to be faithful to what it was supposed to look like based on NASA and everybody else that’s got pictures and recreations of it.”