How NASA made exoplanets into tourist destinations

Looking for the perfect vacation? Do you crave late-night fun? PSO J318.5−22, the planet with no star where nightlife never ends, is perfect for you! Prefer some peace and a chance to catch some rays? Kepler-16b, the land of two suns—where your shadow always has company—is waiting.

In 2015, NASA launched an unusual and brilliant exoplanet outreach campaign, offering retro-style posters, virtual guided tours, and even coloring books. The project quickly went viral worldwide. What explains the success of a campaign about a relatively young field of science that—unlike other areas of space research—lacks spectacular imagery?

Ceridwen Dovey, science communicator, writer, filmmaker, and researcher, has just published in the Journal of Science Communication a Practice Insight paper that presents a case study focusing on the Exoplanet Travel Bureau’s poster campaign. Dovey describes the productive working relationships between scientists and artists that produced this standout work and shows how, in contexts like this, artists are not merely in service to science but can also inspire research itself and help scientists clarify their own thinking.

As Dovey explains, the NASA creative team—led by visual strategist Joby Harris, who has a film and music background—faced at least two challenges.

First, the available visuals: “We live in an age of extraordinary astronomical imagery—the Hubble telescope’s stunning images, for instance—that everybody knows well for their beauty, color and precision,” explains Dovey. “But with exoplanet science imagery, at the moment there’s really not very much to see—and this is a known challenge for the communication of exoplanetary science to the general public.”

The presence of a planet orbiting one or more extremely distant stars is generally inferred from the analysis of large quantities of data: we usually don’t see the planet directly, and must deduce its existence from the effects on its star or on the light the star emits. Even when scientists are lucky enough to obtain a direct image, it’s often rather underwhelming. “There are very few direct images of exoplanets, and usually they are not very visually appealing: they’re just a grainy dot around a sun,” says Dovey.

The second challenge is the rather inhospitable nature of the observed exoplanets: in the vast majority of cases, they are anything but welcoming to humans, a fact that, given the campaign’s concept of imagining exoplanets as tourist destinations of the future, complicated the team’s task.

“The team at the Exoplanet Travel Bureau chose to use 1930s retro-nostalgic image styles inspired by the lovely posters of National Parks like Yosemite created by the Works Progress Administration. Those campaigns sought in part to provide work after the Depression and to attract tourists to iconic national parks like Yellowstone. These posters aimed to evoke the romance of visiting these places and the kinds of nature encounters that would be possible there,” explains Dovey.

Joby Harris and his team decided to create a series of posters imagining exoplanets as if they were just around the corner—your next vacation destination. A playful way to encourage the public to imagine them as real places, drawing on the aesthetics and imagery of the historic series of U.S. national park posters. However, an important issue immediately arose during the discussions between artists and scientists.

“Many of these exoplanets would be really nasty places to visit at a human level,” Dovey points out. “So the team, in their public and online presentations about their work, describes having a lot of interesting conversations with the scientists, where they worked together to imagine these planets as places. This created a really interesting creative process of continuous back-and-forth between artists and scientists.”

Perhaps the most interesting insight to emerge from Dovey’s work is precisely this: “What I hadn’t realized, until I started going to exoplanet science workshops for my research, was that the scientists are also doing a lot of work to try to imagine these places, to a degree.”

Over the course of her study, Dovey came to understand that scientists in this field also make an imaginative leap to turn abstract scientific data into something concrete about a particular planet. Helping the public to “see” the object of their scientific research in these creative image-making practices can help the scientists to steer new lines of inquiry and encourage the public and funding bodies to remain committed to supporting exoplanet research.

In all this, Dovey believes, collaborating with artists is crucial. “Artists and filmmakers and writers and visualizers—we don’t have to be just an add-on at the end of a project to transmit scientific knowledge,” Dovey says.

“We can really be helpful to the scientists, too: not only by questioning their assumptions about how things work, but by going back to the foundations of their planning—mission planning—and showing how research design can be enriched by bringing in a multidisciplinary team from very early on.”