Nasa's secret art studio: how to make rocket science beautiful

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If you’ve marveled at space news recently, there’s a good chance it’s thanks to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This arm of Nasa is responsible for the most ambitious of missions, like sending robots to Mars and, most recently, the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter.

But the JPL has another under-the-radar mission: uniting two uncommon bedfellows – design and science – in new and meaningful ways.

You’ve probably never heard of the Studio at JPL, a group of rocket-science misfits who roam the facilities, offering their not-so-traditional design skills to engineers. You’ve definitely never seen their digs, a trailer on the outskirts of campus that looks like a science fair exploded on the inside. But you may have already seen their work.

The studio comprises eight jacks-of-all-trades who have experience in sci-fi movie effects, anthropology, advertising, architecture and illustration, among others. They work like freelance contractors, usually juggling at least five projects apiece.

For example, Joby Harris has created models of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, and sketched out space helmet designs. And Liz Barrios recently helped an international team of scientists visualize what the surface of a comet would look like for the Rosetta spacecraft landing. (Turns out, the texture of pancakes is a very close comparison.)

The team is also tasked with quietly sprinkling scientifically accurate awe all over the JPL. In the nondescript building number 180, for instance, there’s a sculpture – a column composed of plastic rods that stands about 15 feet high – set to dramatic effect alongside the words, “Dare Mighty Things.” Every few minutes, bars of light, varying in size, drip from above and shoot up from below the column. It’s reminiscent of a particularly active glowworm cave. In reality, it’s the beating heart of JPL’s work.

The sculpture pulls data from a nearby building in the dark room of Mission Control. There, neat desks are arranged audience-style, facing ever-updating screens displaying the real-time activities of the 13 antennae in the Deep Space Network (DSN).

The sculpture is displaying data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which exchanges information with the Wall-E-esque Curiosity rover. When an engineer in Mission Control types directions on a keyboard, Curiosity will do what it’s told. It will then send the data it collects back to the MRO high above the surface of Mars, which sends it to the antenna DSS 55 in Madrid, Spain, which sends it back to Mission Control in Pasadena, which sends a stream of light shooting down the length of the sculpture in building 180.

All of this in real time, with only the delay of about 15 minutes that it takes for the data to travel 33.9 million miles from Mars to Earth.

The JPL is full of unassuming wonders like that – in this case, and in many others, thanks to the studio.

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