PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS DONE FOR NASA.

  These are some of my works commissioned by various NASA facilities. They are offered here to provide something like definitive digital versions of such images, and unfortunately the NASA centers can rarely do this. You paid for them and they're yours.

My work on this page only was created in the public domain, elsewhere on my site I claim copyright on the artwork and text.

I would like to encourage people who enjoy this work to place the images on this page onto other sites for further distribution rather than linking directly to my site, so as to fairly distribute the bandwidth use. I have yet to temporarily pull this page due to bandwidth issues, but I came close February 07!

 

A planetoid plows onto the primordial Earth, during the eons of time when conditions were ripe for the development of life. It is possible that life of kinds unknown to us appeared repeatedly only to be destroyed in collisions like this one which could 'rework' the entire surface. Fortunately the average size of debris declined sharply through geologic time, but the supply of wayward rocks a few kilometers in size is by no means exhausted. Of my hundreds of paintings this is the most widely seen example on the web, a fact aided by the public domain nature of the work! 164K

 

 

The Viking Orbiter spacecraft releases the aeroshell clad lander near the 'high point' of it's orbit around Mars. The planet is shown based on Mariner 9 photography, oriented as it should appear during separation. Oil on canvas panel for NASA Headquarters. 636K

 

 

 

 

 

 

  The Galileo Probe leaves the Orbiter some 180 days before the encounter. Here is the full 4K file. Digital painting for NASA Ames. 664K

 

 

 

 

 

  On ABC's 'Nightline' I heard a report Pioneer 10 would try to image the Sun among the stars as it crossed the orbit of Neptune. This turned out to be not true, and I resolved to create such a view. The sky is accurately portrayed and the Sun with its brighter planets are placed where they would be in relation to the background. The spacecraft is based on hardware photographs. Acrylic on board for NASA Ames. 560K

 

 

 

 

A series of paintings were commissioned by Charles Kolhase of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) depicting highlights of each of the 4 Voyager outer planet encounters. Io and it's volcanoes passes near Jupiter in a view actually seen by the spacecraft. Computer generated line drawings of the planets and stars were supplied to insure accuracy. Io is colored as it appeared in preliminary color balancing attempts, it is actually close to the color of powdered sulfur. Oil on illustration board for JPL. 444K

 

 

Voyager 2 at the moment of it's closest approach to Saturn. The ring divisions were drawn on the board with a rapidograph pen before the paint coats were applied! Earth is the blue 'star' to the right of the Sun, below the Sun is crescent lit Titan. Oil on illustration board for JPL. 528K

 

 

 

 

This painting was commissioned by JPL to commemorate the outer planets mission of the successful pair of Voyager spacecraft. Although done in traditional media, computer drawings were generated as an aid to creating perspective rings of the proper scale for each world, which also has one Moon each highlighted. Only distant shots of Neptune were available at the time the work was done, and the hypothetical 'ring arcs' are included as modeled from earth based star occultation data. Acrylic on board for NASA, JPL. 1MB

 

 

 

 

The view from a fragment of the Shoemaker / Levy 9 comet which fell into Jupiter piece by piece over several days in Late July 1994, around the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11. Acrylic on board for NASA Ames. 212K

 

 

For those of you reaching this page through recent publicity concerning my space colony images you may find my thoughts on space colonies worthwhile.

 

The assembly of the 'Stanford Torus', detailing the proposed 'chevron shields' above the glass 'skylights'. The interior is shown primarily hollowed out and heavily planted. Most other depictions show the colony crammed with lavels of high density housing. Ugh. Oil on board for NASA Ames. 1.1MB

 

 

 

 

 The 1975 NASA Ames/Stanford University Summer Study worked out the broad engineering requirements for a toroidal shaped space colony design. This painting used the design, but I refused to fill the interior with the 'shopping mall gone mad' clutter of other drawings. Again the challenge of sustaining something like a closed ecosystem was a theme I wanted to emphasize. This design became known as the 'Stanford Torus'. Oil on board for NASA Ames. 656K

 

 

  One of my earliest Space Colony paintings was based on the giant 'Model 3' cylindrical habitats envisioned by Gerard O'Neill. I imagined the clouds forming at an 'altitude' around the rotation axis. At this time the scene is bathed in the ruddy light of all the sunrises and sunsets on Earth at that moment as the colony briefly enters the Earths shadow, out at the L5 Lagrangian point where stable locations are easily maintained. Oil on canvas panel disposition unknown. 336K