Artist Peter Rubin, a prolific cinematic illustrator, has lent his talents to Hollywood movies ranging from Roland Emmerich's 1994 epic Stargate to the upcoming reboot Spider-Man: Homecoming.
But when NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) asked him to bring his brand of filmic flare to the agency's roster of candidate space missions, Rubin, a self-described space and science geek, jumped at the opportunity.
"The thinking was that it would behoove JPL, in these times when funding for projects is harder to come by, to take advantage of the fact that they are in the Los Angeles area and there's all this cinematic talent around," Rubin, who began working with NASA in 2013, told me over the phone.
The fruits of this collaboration include gorgeous concept art, illustrations, and animations promoting a mission to 16 Psyche, or simply Psyche, one of the crown jewels of the asteroid belt. For the project, Rubin worked closely with Arizona State University (ASU) planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the mission lead for Psyche, to translate the observational data on this weird metal-rich world into captivating visual representations like this mission trailer.
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