NASA has released three exoplanet "travel posters" intended to pique the public's curiosity about exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope.
The space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has designed three "Exoplanet Travel Bureau" posters highlighting what potential habitable planets among eight newly discovered worlds might look like.
"Where the Grass is Always Redder on the Other Side" is the title of a poster of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size planet found in the potentially "habitable zone" of another star, where liquid water might exist on the planet's surface.
Its star is much cooler and redder than our sun, so plant life there might be a very different color from the green seen on Earth, JPL said.
Another poster, urging us to "Experience the Gravity of a Super Earth," features exoplanet HD 40307g, twice the size of Earth and with eight times its mass, which gives it a gravitation punch much stronger than Earth's.
The third poster brings us Kepler-16b, "Where your shadow always has company." That's because the exoplanet, like the planet Tatooine -- the "Star Wars" home world of Luke Skywaker -- orbits a gravitationally bound pair of stars. That would mean any object on the surface, including a visiting space tourist, would cast two shadows.
The posters feature a vintage or "retro" design reminiscent of posters in the 1930s created by the Works Progress Administration.
The three highlighted planets are among the more than 1,000 alien worlds spotted by the Kepler probe.
The posters are not total flights-of-fantasy, said the JPL designers.
"There was a lot of back-and-forth with the scientists," said David Delgado, one of the poster designers, "figuring out which exoplanets to choose, then noodling on what it would actually [be] like to visit them."
The designers said they were pleasantly surprised by the public enthusiasm the posters have created.
"The posters were really designed primarily for use within JPL," designer Joby Harris said.
However, their public release created a response that was overwhelmingly positive, he added.
"We were a little surprised by it," he admitted.
JPL has artists and designers on staff "to get people excited about space science, to build their curiosity," Delgado said.
Judging by the excitement the posters have caused, they're doing just that.
There are additional exoplanet posters in the works, NASA said, and anyone wanting to print out one of the first three for their bedroom wall can download high-resolution print-optimized versions from JPL's Planet Quest website.
