“Imagination is our window into the future. As you mark the passing of this year with these imaginative destinations, remember that you are the architects of the future. What we make and do will have a profound significance for generations to come. The impact of your efforts go beyond 2020, or even 2050. They will be felt for centuries to come. Be bold in your vision of what tomorrow can be, advance the edge of possibility, and let’s work together to make it come true.”
– NASA JPL Director Charles Elachi
Visual strategists Joby Harris at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, asked Seattle design firm Invisible Creature if they were interested in creating ‘travel posters’ for NASA last autumn, it was a bit of a dream come true job for Don Clark, who started Invisible Creature with his brother Ryan Clark in 2006. “We, of course, were ecstatic, just because our grandfather was an illustrator at NASA for 30 years, and so this is kind of our first NASA project.” The 3 commissioned pieces are part of JPL’s Visions Of The Future 2016 Calendar – an internal gift to JPL and NASA staff, as well as scientists, engineers, government and university staff. The artwork for each month will also be released as a free downloadable poster at the NASA JPL site soon, but all 3 three by Invisible Creature are shown below and are available to purchase from here.
The Grand Tour: NASA’s Voyager mission took advantage of a once-every-175-year alignment of the outer planets for a grand tour of the solar system. The twin spacecraft revealed stunning details about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – using each planet’s gravity to send them on to the next destination. Voyager set the stage for such ambitious orbiter missions as Galileo to Jupiter and Cassini to Saturn. Today both Voyager spacecraft continue to return valuable science from the far reaches of our solar system.
Mars: NASA’s Mars Exploration Program seeks to understand whether Mars was, is, or can be a habitable world. Missions like Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Science Laboratory and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, among many others, have provided important information in understanding of the habitability of Mars. This poster imagines a future day when we have achieved our vision of human exploration of Mars and takes a nostalgic look back at the great imagined milestones of Mars exploration that will someday be celebrated as “historic sites.”
Enceladus: The discovery of Enceladus’ icy jets and their role in creating Saturn’s E-ring is one of the top findings of the Cassini mission to Saturn. Further Cassini mission discoveries revealed strong evidence of a global ocean and the first signs of potential hydrothermal activity beyond Earth – making this tiny Saturnian moon one of the leading locations in the search for possible life beyond Earth.
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