Universe

NASA Is Giving Away Retro Space Travel Posters for Free

February 16, 2016 | Elizabeth Knowles

Astronauts visiting a lake
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

They’ll make you dream of space travel.

NASA, one of the agencies on the forefront of space travel, is daring to dream. Last year, the jet propulsion Laboratory (JPL) designed a set of posters known as The Exoplanet Travel Bureau Poster Series, with taglines such as “Relax on Kepler-16b: The land of two suns—where your shadow always has company.”

Now, they have expanded the series to 14 posters and made them freely available to anyone. All you need to do is visit their website to download the posters to your computer. Humans have never set foot on a planet other than Earth, so these posters are entirely science fiction, but as most good science fiction does, they have science to back them up.

Mars

Retro mars poster

Ever since Mariner 4, a space probe sent by NASA, accomplished the first successful flyby of Mars in 1965, robots have been exploring the land in hopes that humans may join them some day. This poster expresses the dream that someday Mars will be colonized and space tourists will be able to look back on “historical” sites to see how far we will have come.

Ceres

Retro Ceres poster

Ceres is a dwarf planet — like Pluto — located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It the closest dwarf planet to us, and although it has long been believed that it contained water, the hypothesis was only confirmed in 2014.

The Grand Tour

The grand tour of our solar system

This poster references the Voyager space program. Voyager 2 took advantage of a once-every-175-years planetary alignment to fly by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 departed almost four decades ago and flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Both space probes are now past the outer limits of our solar system.

Earth

Retro Earth poster

We have yet to discover a planet quite like our own. We can’t take for granted the fact that life was able to evolve on Earth and that we can freely breathe the air that surrounds us. We must protect it from ourselves and from outside factors.

Europa

retro europa poster

Europa, one of Jupiter’s largest moons, is known for the oceans of liquid water hidden beneath its icy surface — or at least that is the hope. Some scientists believe that we should be focusing our efforts on sending probes or humans to Europa rather than Mars because if there truly is liquid water, there could also be life!

Visit the JPL site to see the others and let us know which one is your favorite!

All images courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

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