At 1:32 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, 6 August 2012, NASA successfully landed the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The landing was 1-minute later than the agency’s estimate when Curiosity launched back in November of 2011. Just moments later, Earth received the first high-resolution photographs of her sister planet. Those initial photographs, which you can find in abundance with a quick search, ignited the world’s imagination anew.
As is typical of our visually-oriented kind, many designers expressed their excitement by creating Mars- and general space-inspired illustrations, layouts, and data visualizations. The last is what most caught my attention. The landing of Curiosity on Mars and the subsequent photos the rover began sending back have everyone excited about space and space exploration again. (Well, maybe not everyone. After all, Tom Cruise and the rest of the Scientology crowd have already been to space and back, haven’t they?) The average Dick and Harry (again, not Tom) has a renewed thirst for knowledge regarding our solar system and the cosmos beyond, and one of the most engaging and informative ways we can communicate that knowledge is through data visualization. Herewith I present to you, for your inspiration in visually representing not just cosmic but any type of facts and data, a collection of amazing space-related infographics.
The images below are merely thumbnails or cropped portions of the infographics; click each thumbnail to be taken to the full infographic in its original location.
Curiosity: 7 Minutes of Terror
Curiosity: How the Mars Science Laboratory Works
Curiosity: To Mars by Sky Crane
The Space Shuttle: An Uncertain Future
This article was last modified on December 13, 2022
This article was first published on August 10, 2012
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