NASA originally commissioned these recruitment posters for an exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor's Complex in 2009. NASA has started using posters like this to help people imagine what a future in space may look like.
courtesy nasa
Mars Explorers Wanted —
This poster depicts the solar system's largest canyon, Valles Marineris, which is located on the Red Planet.
courtesy nasa
Work the Night Shift —
Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, and has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. NASA believes one of these moons could eventually be used as a base from which astronauts could observe the Red Planet and launch robots to further explore its surface.
courtesy nasa
Farmers Wanted —
Just like Matt Damon in "The Martian", NASA believes it will one day need scientists and agronomists to find new ways of growing fresh food on the planet. Among other challenges to farming, Mars has a very different atmosphere to earth and is far colder.
courtesy nasa
Surveyors Wanted —
Mars' moons, Phobos and Deimos, are some of the smallest in the solar system but can be seen clearly from most parts of the planet. Phobos rises twice during a Martian day while Deimos takes 30 hours for each orbit.
courtesy nasa
Teach on Mars —
The recruitment posters target a wide range of professions, from teachers to farmers to surveyors, that NASA may one day need on Mars.
courtesy nasa
Technicians Wanted —
"Whether repairing an antenna in the extreme environment of Mars, or setting up an outpost on the moon Phobos, having the skills and desire to dare mighty things is all you need," NASA says of the engineers it may one day recruit to help with its 'Journey To Mars.'
courtesy nasa
User Assembly Required —
It may be a while yet before all these people are needed. NASA released its three-step 'Journey to Mars' plan to colonize the Red Planet in 2015, and aims to have people living and working in colonies on Mars by 2030.
courtesy nasa
Mars, illustrated by Invisible Creature —
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released a set of "travel posters" depicting various cosmic destinations. This poster shows Mars as a habitable world. The posters -- the brainchild of The Studio, the design and strategy team at JPL -- are a way to celebrate the discovery of planets. JPL visual strategist David Delgado says of the designs: "All of these far off places are hard to get to, but they are there. The immediate thought was, if we could go there someday, what would it be like?"
Invisible Creature
Enceladus, illustrated by Invisible Creature —
Enceladus' icy jets have a pivotal role in creating Saturn's E-ring. Other findings from NASA's Cassini mission show strong evidence of a global ocean and hydrothermal activity beyond Earth.
Invisible Creature
Grand Tour, illustrated by Invisible Creature —
Once every 175 years Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune align. NASA's Voyager mission was designed to take advantage of this alignment in the late 1970s and the 1980s.
Invisible Creature
Ceres, illustrated by Liz Barrios De La Torre —
Ceres is the closest dwarf planet to the Sun and the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Could the planet be a future rest stop enroute to Jupiter?
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Venus, illustrated by Jessie Kawata —
This poster imagines the "best" vantage point on Venus, to spot the Mercury Transit -- or when Mercury comes between the Sun and Earth.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Earth, illustrated by Joby Harris —
There's no place like home. NASA's earth science missions study our planet as a whole system -- to understand how it's changing.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Titan, illustrated by Joby Harris —
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has a surface shaped by rivers and lakes of liquid ethane and methane. In this depiction, visitors could paddle through the Kraken Mare.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Europa, illustrated by Liz Barrios De La Torre —
Jupiter's icy moon Europa is believed to conceal a global ocean of salty liquid water twice the volume of Earth's oceans.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
In 1995, scientists discovered 51 Pegasi b. The exoplanet is about half the mass of Jupiter.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
HD 40307 g is an exoplanet located 42 light-years away. Its gravity would be at least twice as strong as it is on Earth.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Kepler-16b, illustrated by Joby Harris —
The extrasolar planet Kepler-16b is billed as the "land of two suns" for the twin orbs that shine down on it.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Kepler-186f, illustrated by Joby Harris —
Kepler-186f orbits a cooler, redder sun. The discovery of Kepler-186f was a step in finding worlds with similar characteristics to Earth.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
PSO-J318.5-22, illustrated by Joby Harris —
PSO-J318.5-22 belongs to a special class of free-floating planets, called rogue. They wander alone in the galaxy and do not orbit a parent star. The planets glow faintly from the heat of their formation until they cool down completely.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Is this the most incredible light show in the solar system? Jupiter's auroras are hundreds of times more powerful than Earth's. This poster depicts the Jovian cloudscape.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Stefan G. Bucher
These images were created from a 1975 research study of future space colonies led by Princeton professor Gerard O'Neill. The NASA-sponsored paper born of it was given to artists Rick Guidice and Don Davis, who illustrated the fantastical and as yet unrealized concepts. More on that story here.
NASA Ames Research Center
O'Neill's team settled on three potential designs for the future space stations: the Bernal Sphere, the Toroidal Colony (pictured) and the Cylindrical Colony. Potential capacity ranged from 10,000 people to one million, and featured circular designs which rotated to generate artificial gravity.
NASA Ames Research Center
The Cylindrical Colony, the most spacious of O'Neill's concepts, had huge windows fitted to allow light to filter through to the landscapes within. The design, later dubbed the 'O'Neill Cylinder', was riffed on in Christopher Nolan's intergalactic blockbuster "Interstellar" forty years later.
NASA Ames Research Center
The Bernal Sphere was first proposed by John Desmond Bernal as far back as 1929, with O'Neill's team adapting the half-century old idea. Shrunk down to 500 meters wide they proposed a highly-curved living surface that featured a "crystal palace" for agriculture and light reflected in via windows near the poles.
NASA Ames Research Center
O'Neill in a paper presented to NASA uses 1990 as a hypothetical start date for a space colony, with the team drawing up a number of potential costs for construction and transportation -- even the volume of livestock each station would need to ship in.
NASA Ames Research Center
Rick Guidice's painting of a cutaway of the Bernal Sphere also shows some of the huge solar arrays required to power the station and its rotation.
NASA Ames Research Center
Despite the futuristic technology required to put such a massive structure in space, all of the artwork from Guidice and Davis shows lush green landscapes -- a far cry from the reality of the International Space Station today.
NASA Ames Research Center
O'Neill suggests that the compact living area of the Bernal Sphere could be offset with separate agricultural modules, spacious enough for industrial-scale farming.
NASA Ames Research Center
Don Davis' illustration of a Cylindrical Colony imagines what a solar eclipse would look like from space, featuring two columns of land hidden from the sun altogether experiencing and night time.
NASA Ames Research Center
Davis depicts a construction crew piecing together a Bernal Sphere complete with houses, grass and rivers, seemingly unscathed by the vacuum of space.
NASA Ames Research Center
The Cylindrical Colony was never envisaged a solitary structure, instead orbiting with a partner.
