Here is the New York Times review of "Roving Mars", with some interesting background info:
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/movies/25mars.html?_r=1]
A few excerpts I found interesting:
"Roving Mars" was itself launched in 2000, when George Butler, the director of "The Endurance," a documentary on Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1914, was cutting an Imax version of that film. His editor was Tim Squyres, brother of Steve, who has edited many of Ang Lee's films and whose work on "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" that year earned him an Oscar nomination.
At one point that June, Mr. Butler said, Tim Squyres was on the phone with his brother, talking about the Mars project, when Mr. Butler heard him mention Imax-quality cameras - "the magic line," he said. He was instantly hooked.
And ....
His project finally got moving, Mr. Butler said, when he approached the producer Frank Marshall, who had wanted to distribute the Shackleton movie and loved the Mars idea. Mr. Marshall took it to Disney, where a deal was struck - but only after Dr. Squyres had satisfied studio skeptics that Imax-caliber images could truly be transmitted all the way from Mars.
Indeed, the cameras that Dr. Squyres and Dr. Bell had installed on the rovers - somewhere shy of the state of the art even when the rovers were designed - could capture only one megapixel at a time, about the equivalent of a cellphone camera. That would mean stitching about 250 images together seamlessly to create a panoramic picture big enough to fill an Imax screen - a task that takes one to three days on Mars, where the solar-powered rovers can function for only a few hours around noon.
Worse, the distance from Earth restricts the bandwidth of data transmissions to that of an old 128-kilobyte dial-up modem, meaning that it can take up to a week to send a panoramic picture back. (All told, the rovers have put together a portfolio of about two dozen big panoramas, according to Dr. Bell, who is writing a coffee-table book that will include many of them.)
But I was sad to hear it is only 40 minutes long ...though I still can't wait to go and see it when it opens in Austin