NASA JPL: Grace-FO and Psyche

Two very different space missions  – GRACE-FO and Psyche – undertaken by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) allowed us to tell stories of how deep space can help us understand our own planet. 

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Responsible for the agency’s robotic space missions, NASA’s JPL division sought our help to promote its GRACE-FO mission through the creation of a screen-based installation at their HQ and a bespoke typographic language. 

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The mission relies on twin GRACE satellites that co-orbit Earth 137 miles apart, detecting differences in gravity that reveal changes in aquifers, lakes, rivers, soil, ice sheets and glaciers, and sea levels. The vast quantity of data they gather creates new visibility about how water moves around our changing planet.

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“We were excited by the idea of space – but for us, it wasn’t just about space exploration. It was about protecting the earth.” Nigel Cottier, Design Director

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This data would form the core of a screen-based public installation at JPL’s base in California. Working between Pasadena and London, we united around the idea of centering key, live data from the GRACEs, alongside powerful visuals of water in motion.

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A custom font, used to share stories relayed back from space, gives GRACE her ‘voice’ in the installation, and elsewhere. Influenced by Juriaan Schrofer's work, and made up of vertical and horizontal rhomboid strokes that represent the satellites’ forms, it captures the twins’ fundamental interdependence. 

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Its success led JPL to invite us to create a poster series marking another mission – Psyche, the journey to explore a metal-type asteroid, located more than 186 million miles from Earth – that could unlock the mysteries of our own planet’s formation. 

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Seven years in the making, the Psyche mission is extraordinarily complex, from the journey to reach the asteroid in 2029, to its scientific instruments, to its optical communication system capable of transmitting data across 140 million miles. 

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“We've gotten to this amazing point in human evolution where the things we're trying to build or solve cannot be understood by a single person; they have to be done in teams." Dr Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche’s Principal Investigator.

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Distributed to high schools across the USA, our poster series celebrates the collective human effort, tenacity and ingenuity that made Psyche’s critical work possible. A halftone graphic depicting the spacecraft and asteroid making contact is made up of 1,641 symbols – one for every person and discipline involved in the mission. Further graphics detail the purpose, journey, and science behind this human-powered odyssey to a metal world.

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