Nasa recently unveiled a gorgeous set of travel posters advertising the most exciting sights in the Universe as it revealed a $19 billion budget request designed to fund a manned mission to Mars. Read more: Retro Nasa posters envisage a stunning future in which humans live in Earth's orbit
The Visions of the Future posters are an extension of the 'Exoplanet Travel Bureau' series published in 2015. Designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the posters depict planets and moons in our Solar System that humans, or more likely robots, will potentially one day visit. More recently, following the announcement of a nearby solar system around the TRAPPIST-1 star, Nasa published a single poster showing what a trip to one of the seven planets in the new system – TRAPPIST 1-e – would look like.
The other posters advertise alien worlds such as the dwarf planet Ceres ("queen of the asteroid belt"), promote the "mighty auroras" of Jupiter and the tides of Titan as Saturn sets in the far, far distance, with hopeful images of humans exploring those landscapes.
In reality, conditions on these worlds are such that manned exploration is virtually impossible, but Nasa's point – of course – is that discovery of these places is already ongoing. Nasa's Dawn spacecraft arrived in orbit around Ceres in March 2015, the Juno missions provided new insights into the polar caps of Jupiter, and we have already landed on Titan and learned much about its surface from the Cassini orbiter.
Poignantly, the poster advertising Mars is designed in an explicitly retro style, with a call to "visit the historic sights" of humanity's "past" exploration of the surface. In terms of "robotic pioneers", of course, that much is true – Nasa has two functioning robots on the surface of the Red Planet and many more have preceded them. But the poster's inclusion of "arts and culture", and "architecture and agriculture" hints at the space agency's hopes for a more extensive effort to colonise and transform that dead planet into one that forms a natural outpost for life as we know it.
Meanwhile, Nasa reinforces its support for Earth science in the JPL poster series, with an image that shows astronauts with their helmets removed. "Your oasis in space," the poster reads. "Where the air is free and breathing is easy."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
