At a Comic-Con panel today, Dr. Harry Kloor — who holds doctorate degrees in physics and chemistry — updated the audience on his animated project Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey.

The 3D, CGI animated film releases in large format theaters in February 2010. It includes footage of planets and moons such as Venus, Mercury, Mars and Titan that is based on real radar data provided by the Cassini-Huygens satellite.

The project started at NASA around 1997, Kloor explained, but it had to wait until 2008 for the satellite to provide the required information.

At that time, Kloor said, scientists were asking why protons and electrons are able to accelerate away from the Sun. Kloor had an idea about how that could happen, and included his explanation — that the particles actually surf on the solar winds — in his script for the film.

Two years later NASA published a study confirming that protons are able to accelerate by surfing solar winds.

Kloor was joined on stage by three cast members: Robert Picardo (Star Trek Voyager, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis), Doug Jones (Hellboy, Hellboy 2, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) and Janina Gavankar (The L Word).

Chris Pine called in on a mobile to say hello to the cheering crowd.

Other cast members include William Shatner, Brent Spiner, Abigail Breslin and Spencer Breslin, Jason Alexander, Sandra Oh, Amanda Peet, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Mark Hamill, Hayden Christensen and Neil Armstrong.

"Yes," said Kloor, "I purposely cast two Kirks and two Darth Vaders."

Kloor wanted to share other discoveries that have come from the Cassini-Huygens project that are incorporated into the film: "There is a moon that has ice geysers that shoot out about the diameter of the moon. They speculate there could be life under that ice because it is so warm."

"Isn't that cool?" he said.

"The point of the movie," said Kloor, "was to promote science and education and to inspire."

To that end, there is a wealth of free educational material that is part of Quantum Quest, largely delivered through the project's Web site that went live today.

But the film is also intended to entertain, said Kloor, "so we cheated on scale."

"And the actors worked for scale," joked Picardo.