The Science Behind the Movies: Five movies about space that get their science right

Screencapture via Stanley Kubrick/YouTube

Friday, November 7, 2014, 5:35 PM - From various reviews around the web at the moment, it's starting to look like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar may not be quite so steeped in good science as it originally seemed. To make up for this, here are five movies about space that really got their science right (Spoiler Alert for anyone who hasn't seen these)!

Five: Europa Report

While our current search for life beyond Earth is mainly focused on Mars, Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, is a prime candidate for future missions. In the 2013 movie, Europa Report, a team of 6 astronauts makes that journey, hopeful for amazing discoveries. Unfortunately their greatest hope becomes their worst nightmare.

Despite being a horror movie set in space, which is usually a cue to just give up on there being any chance at realism, according to what Kevin Hand, the Deputy Chief Scientist of NASA's Solar System Exploration Directorate, told Popular Science, the science contained in Europa Report is fairly accurate.

"There are a few mistakes here and there, but I have to say it's well above average in terms of scientific accuracy," he said in the interview.

The areas that were stretched a bit, for the purposes of furthering the story, mainly had to do with the Europan(?) environment. For one, the ice that forms Europa's outer surface was much too thin in the movie (it's apparently at least a few kilometres thick in reality). However, what works better in a movie, having the backdrop of Jupiter in your scenes from Europa's surface or having the astronauts in total darkness after drilling down three kilometres into the ice? Also, finding life on the surface is probably unlikely, given the levels of radiation there. There are certainly extremophile organisms here on Earth, but Hand says they don't expect to find anything living on the surface.

"The harsh cold and radiation make that a losing proposition," he told PopSci. "That's not the way it'd happen. We could, however, find complex organic molecules or maybe dead, frozen life on the surface."

Four: Deep Impact

The 1998 counterpart to the bigger blockbuster Armageddon (which had some colossally bad science in it), Deep Impact went to far-greater lengths to get things right.

It still managed to get quite a few minor (and two major) things wrong, though.

For one, comets - by their very nature - don't stay hidden for long, especially one that's coming so close to Earth. As soon as the comet got close to the orbit of Mars, it would have developed a coma and tail, and would have been clearly visible to anyone who happened to be looking in that direction with the right kind of telescope. There are plenty of amateur astronomers and sky surveys out there scanning the night skies for these kinds of objects, so this comet would have been spotted by numerous people, not just the main character. There's no way the government would have been able to hide it's approach from the public.

Another was that the surface of the comet nucleus was depicted as being a mix of whites and greys. Comet nuclei are actually more like charcoal black. Look at pictures of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which the ESA's Rosetta spacecraft will drop a lander onto next week. Even the brightest-lit regions are still a dark grey colour, and that's with Rosetta's cameras set to the best exposure levels possible to get the details.

The biggest mistake was in having the astronauts blow up the comet nucleus. The initial attempt, using a nuclear bomb, just fractured the comet in two, and the final attempt shattered the larger piece into thousands of smaller fragments. That's a fairly satisfying ending, if you just accept that the damage from the smaller piece hitting Earth was unavoidable. However, rather than those smaller chunks just burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere, it would be more likely to rain death down upon a wide swatch of Earth. When you're dealing with an 11-kilometre-wide comet, that's a lot of ice, not to mention any large chunks of rock that might happen to be embedded in the ice. A 100 metre-wide chunk of this comet ice - easily possible, given that's roughly one-ten-thousandth of a percent of the size of the whole comet - travelling at the average speed of 51 kilometres per second, would explode at around 6,000 metres above the surface, leveling buildings and trees for kilometres in all directions.

It wouldn't make for an incredibly exciting movie-going experience, but the best way to deal with a comet on a collision course is to use light (ie: radiation pressure from the Sun's light) or gravity to nudge it off course. Given how long these measures take, though, we'd be sitting in the theatre for a long time!

Three: Contact

Okay, fine, we didn't get to see the aliens in this movie, but come on. If we ever actually see an alien someday, it's going to be seriously... alien... and probably disturbing. Carl Sagan, who wrote the original story, had the right idea that these aliens would appear to us as the person we respected most, so that they would converse with the higher-order regions of our brain, instead of dealing with our screaming amygdalae.

That aside, this movie (and the original book, of course) had a lot of good science in it. The SETI program. Contact coming from radio signal arriving from space, rather than alien ships traversing billions of kilometres of empty space to descend into our atmosphere. The methods used to detect the signal and verify it, and continue to track it with different monitoring stations around the world as the Earth rotated. The fact that the signal contained 'the true universal language', mathematics. Even the ideas behind the use of wormholes as a method of interstellar travel. These were all quite sound.

There were a few mistakes made, though. 

When Ellie is trying to prove a point about how many civilizations could be out there in our galaxy, she starts with the 400 billion stars we estimate in our galaxy and goes through a simplified version of the Drake Equation - if one in a million has planets and one in a million of those has life and one in a million of those has intelligence life, etc. She comes up with millions of civilizations ... but she's off by quite a big factor. Even going down to 1 in 1000 for each step still gives you just 400 planets with intelligent life in our galaxy. Quite honestly, this could be a normal kind of mistake anyone could make when they're excited about a subject, but that was definitely an "oops" moment.

At the end, when Ellie returns from her journey, hours have gone by for her, yet no time passed here on Earth. That's probably not how that would have gone down. While it might be possible that travelling through a wormhole (even more than one, as Ellie did) could take no time at all, you'd still have to account for the time she spent interacting with her alien-father at the other end.

Otherwise, if you can get past the 'not-seeing-the-aliens' part, you can't get too much better than one.

Two: Apollo 13

Well, I said "too much" better, but this one qualifies. Apollo 13 is one of the most accurate space movies out there, mainly because - beyond some possibly fabricated conflict between the crew - it's not fiction. These events really happened, in nearly exactly the way that it was portrayed in the movie.

According to Dan Satterfield, of the American Geophysical Union, one of the only fudges in the 'science' seems to be an embellishment on the part of the director or the effects team on how difficult it was to perform a mid-course correction.

One - 2001: A Space Odyssey

The ponderously-slow pace of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction masterpiece might not be to everyone's taste, but there's very little to dispute about the science that's depicted in the film. The most that can be said against it is that the movie isn't perfect in its predictions of what things would be like in the real year 2001.

For example, the computers we had by 2001 were quite advanced, but we still hadn't achieved the kind of artificial intelligence that HAL represents (which, according to Elon Musk, is probably a good thing).

There is an Earth-orbiting space station in the film, and the International Space Station was 'open for business' as of Expedition 1's arrival in November 2000, so that much matches. However, the station in the movie was much larger than the ISS, was shaped like a wheel, and it spun on its central axis, to give parts of the station gravity. The ISS astronauts and cosmonauts float around in zero-g at all times.

In the film, a PanAm spaceplane flew passengers up to that station. In the real 2001, NASA was using the plane-like Space Shuttles, but they certainly didn't look like luxury passenger planes on the inside, and the PanAm airline had been out of business since the early '90s. The film does get one aspect of that right, though, since it predicts the start of private spaceflight.

The film also depicts a year 2001 where space exploration apparently had a much higher priority over the years. Whereas in reality humans still haven't been back to the Moon since 1972, the movie has people there conducting an archaeological dig (finding the first monolith) in 2001. Also, while in reality the farthest people have travelled from Earth is still just over 400,000 kilometres (on the Apollo 13 mission), it seems that in the movie, the will and resources exist to build a ship to fly astronauts to Jupiter.