Art in Space on the OSIRIS-REx Mission!

“Space exploration is an inherently creative activity,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “We are inviting the world to join us on this great adventure by placing their art work on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, where it will stay in space for millennia.”


[SOURCE: NASA Press Release 16-019]

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EXPLORE & DISCOVER

While you read, this Collector Edition artwork has a digital copy traveling through outer-space in an "Earth Art" exhibit about exploration, via NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission! The objective of the mission is to collect samples from the asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth. As a bonus, OSIRIS-REx will take the chip of Earth Art, poetry, and creative writing to a stable orbit around the sun thereafter, where it will remain for Millenia to come! 


#WeTheExplorers      #osirisREx 


While this original artwork is already sold to a private collector, 

please enjoy the real "human exploration" history depicted (not to scale) in this Artwork.


Prints and Products available only through Fine Art America and Pixels.


 
 

ART in SPACE!

"This one artwork will undoubtedly outlive me in this lifetime. Very few Artisans can say that with such certainty." -M.E.

February 19, 2016

NASA calls for Art Submissions (see press release above) to join the OSIRIS-REx (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer) Mission and M.E. of Look Past It .com answers the call with a stream of consciousness painting aiming to convey the power of exploration discovering new perspectives. 

The Mission itself aims to obtain and return samples from a carbon-based, multi-billion year old asteroid as tall as the Empire State Building, said to be remnants of our solar system's formation. 

March 20, 2016

NASA prepares the digital chip for space travel, with M.E.'s "Explore & Discover" acrylic painting among the collection of visual, written, and auditory arts.

Perspective is everything, and only through exploration can we discover new perspectives. This artwork aims to convey that, while also paying tribute to the amazing feats of human imagination and engineering. 

We've evolved from a perspective that wondered if the world had an end, an edge we might fall off of, and saw the lights in the sky as some sort of divinity... to a perspective of our ever-expanding universe and an unending desire to understand it's nuances! 

September 8, 2016

OSIRIS-REx launches flawlessly at 7:05 PM EDT from Cape Canaveral, Florida on an Atlas V rocket in the 411 configuration.
  
M.E. of Look Past It .com officially has Art in Space!

Art that will get to do what no other human Art has done, live on a Space Craft sampling an asteroid, and then, orbiting the sun for as long as the space craft remains viable. Millenia! 

September 22, 2017

OSIRIS-REx swings by Earth to "borrow" some gravity for a 'sling-shot' toward the asteroid Bennu. 

"During its Earth Gravity Assist maneuver last September, OSIRIS-REx used its MapCam imager to capture this color composite portrait of the spacecraft's home planet, centered on the Pacific Ocean. The dark vertical streaks at the top of the image are caused by short exposure times (less than three milliseconds), which were used to image Earth because the planet is much brighter than the dark asteroid the cameras were designed to image."
[source: OSIRIS-REx e-mail update 20180417]

The spacecraft also captured spectral data, and images of the Moon and the Earth-Moon system during its flyby.

M.E. celebrates her Dad's birthday on the same day by sending him a poster of the event and thanking him for always believing!

JANUARY - OCTOBER 2018

After the gravity assist, OSIRIS-REx is traveling an average of 64,186 mph ( 103,297 kph ), so by January 2018, our Earth and moon are 39.5 million miles ( 63.6 million km ) away, and little more than a bright light in the dark sky.

That is one far-traveled Art Exhibition!

To approach the target, the space-craft actually has to preform a series of breaking manuvers to slow down enough to align with the asteroid Bennu, averaging 63,000 mph ( 101,389 kph! ) around our sun at near the same orbit as Earth. 

Yes, that makes this asteroid doomed to collide with Earth in the late 22nd century, but we will undoubtedly have the technology to thwart it by then!

Fall 2018 - Spring 2019

OSIRIS-REX surveys Bennu, collecting data and selecting the best place for sampling. 

Believe it or not, Joe-and-Jane-Normal-Scientists were asked to help NASA and the OSIRIS-REx team... count rocks. It sounds boring and not very glorious, but it's vital to a successful sample collection. Can't have rocks flying around that could damage our beautiful space-craft now, can we? Sample selection site candidates were selected, in part, by the fewest number of potentially hazardous rocks.

In the surveying, Bennu becomes the first 'Active' Asteroid to be observed up-close, and OSIRIS-REx the first to observe it. For those really interested in the discoveries that were waiting for us upon Bennu, please visit the asteroidmission.org summary of the OSIRIS-REx special collection in Nature. 

October 20, 2020

After many rehearsals, it's official:      touch-down!

Want to see how the scientists designed this space-craft to collect samples from an asteroid over 200 million miles from Earth?

OSIRIS-REx will continue to collect samples of Bennu's surface material, at least 2.1 ounces (59.5 grams) and up to 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of it, in January 2021, if this day's samples aren't enough.

 It's a lot of work to take samples from such a long distance! 

March 2021

With samples stowed, OSIRIS-REx heads back to Earth five years after the mission launched into space!

SEPT 2023

OSIRIS-REx drops the samples off on Earth before the rest of the craft deflects from Earth to find a stable orbit around the sun. 

There, the “Earth Art” collection remains for millennia… like the stars themselves.
 

Can't you just feel we're on the leading edge?