Creating a Movie with Data from Outer Space in R

The Rosetta mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) is one of the greatest (yet underappreciated) triumphs of humankind: it was launched in 2004 and landed the spacecraft Philae ten years later on a small comet, named 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (for the whole timeline of the mission see here: Timeline of Rosetta spacecraft).

ESA provided the world with datasets of the comet which we will use to create an animated gif in R… so read on!

The only prerequisites that we need is the rgl package (on CRAN) and an installed version of ImageMagick: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php.

The script itself is very short due to the powerful functions of the rgl package, the dataset is loaded directly from the internet site of ESA:

library(rgl)
comet <- readOBJ(url("http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/doc.cfm?fobjectid=54726")) # may take some time to load

open3d()
## wgl 
##   1

rgl.bg(color = c("black"))
shade3d(comet, col = ("gray"))
movie3d(spin3d(axis = c(0, 0, 1)), duration = 12, dir = getwd())
## Writing 'movie000.png'
## Writing 'movie001.png'
## Writing 'movie002.png'
## Writing 'movie003.png'
[...]
## Writing 'movie118.png'
## Writing 'movie119.png'
## Writing 'movie120.png'
## Loading required namespace: magick

system("cmd.exe", input = paste("cd", getwd(), "&& convert -loop 0 movie.gif philae.gif")) # change GIF animation cycles to inf
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.706]
(c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\Holger\[...]>cd C:/Users/Holger/[...] && convert -loop 0 movie.gif philae.gif

C:\Users\Holger\[...]>

The result is quite impressive:

I also used the dataset to create a 3D printout which is now on my desk in the office at my university:

What a symbol of the power of science to have a 3D printout of a cosmic roamer on your desk and an animated image of it on your computer!