Image(s) of the day: NASA’s vintage travel posters

Seeking to inspire renewed interest at a time of heavy budgetary constraint, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) design studio released a new series of vintage travel posters depicting planets and moons within our solar system as potential vacation getaways. The tongue-in-cheek initiative is a modern adaption of the posters created in the during the Great Depression, in which the Works Projects Administration (WPA) commissioned artists to create travel posters that encourage tourists to visit national parks in the United States.

A preview of the entire collection is available below. 12 of the posters were designed in-house by JPL’s design studio, while the Mars, Enceladus (Saturn’s moon), and Grand Tour poster were commissioned by the Grammy nominated design studio Invisible Creature. Note that the “Grand Tour” is an ironic naming convention that relates the planetary alignment, which allowed the Voyager mission to visit multiple locations, to an international trip undertaken by privileged European men between the 1660s and the 1840s.

Although the illustration is aesthetically pleasing in their own right, the scope of the project is to inspire deep thinking about humankind’s future in space exploration. Take the Europa poster for instance: while it figuratively depicts humans underneath the subterranean of Jupiter’s moon, NASA is commencing a mission to explore Europa’s oceans in the 2020s.

Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

In fact, each poster boasts a bit of an irony in how it relates art to fact. Jupiter travel poster writes “Experience the might auroras of Jupiter” to highlight the uniqueness of Jupiter’s auroras, which are hundreds of time more powerful than those on Earth and form a glowing ring around each pole that’s larger than the Earth itself.

Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

Under the pretense of “imagination is our window in the future,” NASA encourages users to download the images by sizes in case users want to print their copies for office or cubicle decoration. The entire collection is available here , simply click each thumbnail and you’ll have the option to download either a printable PDF version or a high-resolution TIFF version with a superior pixel density for those who wish to print the full 20 x 30 size poster.

Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

Source: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory