Rosetta Mission: How an illustrator helped NASA-JPL land on a comet
Welcome to the Why AxS, ArtCenter’s podcast challenging scientific and artistic minds to examine universal questions about the nature of existence from differing perspectives.
For our first episode, How to Land on a Comet, we boarded JPL’s Rosetta Mission, where we were joined by astrophysicist Art Chmielewski and illustrator Liz de la Torre (BFA 13), a team who had recently worked together to visualize the surface of speeding comet.
Landing on a comet as it zips through space poses a seemingly infinite degree of difficulty and danger. And that's just one reason why Rosetta remains one of NASA/JPL's most ambitious and arduous space exploration missions.
Further raising the stakes were the inevitable spacecraft collisions with troughs, crevices and scarps littered across the celestial object’s landscape.
Seeking an artistic solution to a scientific problem Chmielewski recruited de la Torre while she was a student at ArtCenter to map the comet's surface to help prepare for the worst.
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.
To accurately depict the comet's topography, de la Torre interviewed some of the world's leading experts on comets. Based on their projections, she 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 tiny pores and bubbling gas, allowed scientists to plan for all eventualities and helped secure the mission’s success.
Not only did De la Torre's collaboration with Chimiliewski yield a safer, more effective mission. It has created a new method for memorializing JPL missions within a lasting work of art.
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