Rosetta Mission: How an illustrator helped NASA-JPL land on a comet
Welcome to the Why AxS, ArtCenter’s podcast featuring brilliant scientific and artistic minds ponder the big why's that come with being a tiny part of this universe.
Our first episode, How to Land on a Comet, takes you aboard JPL’s Rosetta Mission, as we’re joined by mission planner Art Chmielewski + alum/illustrator Liz de la Torre (BFA 13), who mapped the surface of speeding comet for a first-of-a-kind rendezvous with a spacecraft—from a single pixel.
Rosetta remains one of the world’s most ambitious—and arduous—space exploration missions. Landing on a comet as it zips and twists through space poses seemingly limitless degrees of difficulty and danger.
Not to mention no one can predict the potential troughs, crevices and scarps that await across the celestial object’s landscape.
Seeking an artistic solution to a scientific problem—how to map the comet’s surface—Chmielewski recruited de la Torre while she was a student at ArtCenter.
The engineers and scientists worked together, but I wasn't sure if they understood each other—people are very visual. For that reason, I hired a very bright illustrator from ArtCenter to turn these words into illustrations so the conversation could go further.
Art ChmielewskiJPL
Now working as a Creative Strategist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, de la Torre acts as an artistic interpreter of scientific theories, using the illustration skills she honed at the College.
For the Rosetta Mission, de la Torre listened to some of the world's leading experts on comets, and based on their ideas and projections, created multiple approximations of the comet’s terrain.
Someone would say there's icy patches, and another scientist would say, actually, there's no wind there to support that. So there was tension at times. I ended up creating over 20 illustrations of different versions of what the terrain could be.
Liz de la TorreJPL
These beautifully detailed visuals, capturing the comet’s potential tiny pores and bubbling gas, allowed scientists to better visualize the best approach—and helped secure the mission’s success.
They are truly brilliant works of art and science.
Join ArtCenter’s Lauren Mahoney and Ethan Stockwell for an episode full of behind-the-scenes insights into everything from the search for life in the universe to the hidden impact of space research on our everyday lives as we embark on an extraordinary and otherworldly ride.
Listen and Subscribe
Why AxS
Join us for ArtCenter’s new mini-series investigating the powers of art and science–and the extraordinary, unexpected outcomes when the two fields intersect.
