Putting the 'Art' in Artemis
An art aimed at astronauts. "MARSA".
Summary
Considering the technical aspects of the trip to mars, many precautions must be taken to somewhat ensure the safety of the trip. The risks of the trip vary in their level from bearable to unbearable. These risks are the length of the trip, the loss of contact between the astronauts and the space center, facing objects in space they know little about, and many other risks.Our team decided to make a relatable story to engage the reader and let them know more about the case. The story was made in the shape of a comic book so it is easily read by all ages. Also the story tells a real life scenario of many former astronauts who have left their families in the sake of making more discoveries.
How We Addressed This Challenge
It is so harsh to live in space. Astronauts who spend long time isolated in the space may suffer from many psychological problems. In addition to the hard conditions of life. We thought of a way we can help in reducing this dilemma. We came up with our idea, the comic “MARSA”.
We are a group of six students who love arts and hope our art reaches the world and help in solving vital problems. Representing your ideas with art and creativity always makes it easy to make impact on people.
We designed a comic, unique to us, and we called it “MARSA”. “MARSA” is about the family of an astronaut who is going to travel to Mars. We wanted to show how hard these people deal with their family far away from them, and how their family and relatives deal with this.
We with “MARSA” wish to spread our idea and let the people know how these astronauts and their families suffer. With this taken into consideration, NASA will surely develop a way to make this trip much easier than a long journey. Here is a link to our demo and the comic.
The demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55U8dlaNaE
The comic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyvBrOIFsDM&t=11s
How We Developed This Project
As the MARSA team, we have professional art skills that we wanted to use in making good and inspiring projects that can carry a message and send it directly to the audience, we think that art is our weapon to make positive effects on society so, as this challenge is centered on using art to make meaningful projects we used our art skills to make a project that talks about the risks of Mars trip.
This project has passed many steps to be done. At first, getting the idea which was the most important step as it identifies the rest of the steps. The idea was found, a dad who leaves his wife and daughter because of the Mars trip, and then it was the idea’s implementation time. As the first step of implementation time, the scenes were drawn in paper and then drawn in a digital form. After that, the introduction video was animated and modified. As the last step, the team members filled out the required data of the project.
The scenes were converted to digital photos by using Adobe illustrator from the paper version, and then they were converted to photos using Adobe Photoshop. The logo was made by using the same software programs. The introduction video was drawn frame by frame using Flipaclip software app and then the frames were animated, and the video was made by using Youcut and Adobe Premiere pro.
Nothing can be done professionally for the first time. In our condition, drawing the project was a problem as we have to draw the same character in different conditions so, we made a lot of drawings and modifications until we reached the final project which was made perfectly. The second problem was the scenes as we changed it as well as making big modifications to it. The last problem was the limited time of the introduction video that forced us to make some changes to our introduction video. After solving these problems and trying hard our team successfully used art to deliver a message as well as spread awareness about Mars trips by drawing a short story.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
In order to make an outline for the story, it was essential to know some information about Mars and its conditions, also the details about the trip to Mars: the preparation, the duration and the conditions. Another point of concern is the hazards involved in such a travel. This is the link to the article which talked about the space hazards (https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/5-hazards-of-human-spaceflight). The second resource used was a NASA photo album about Mars and its conditions, from which we used a photo in making our comic (https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_85.html).
Project Demo
This is the 30-seconds video demo to our project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55U8dlaNaE
Project Code
Data & Resources
- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Close-up of the Red Planet, Mars, an image collection from NASA.
- https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_85.html
- 5 Hazards of Human Spaceflight, An article from NASA.
- https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/5-hazards-of-human-spaceflight