Just having fun with the first post ever by putting up the official patch of our mission. Took a fair amount of critique and plenty of emails back and forth, but after a lot of input from the rest of the crew I jumped into Illustrator and made this vaguely retro mission patch describing our time here.

First is the flags, representing where we’re all from. America, Germany, England, and France, some of the flags had to be simplified, couldn’t fit in all those stars, hope it’s ok!

As for the glyphs following each name:

Bassingthwaighte: This is the TARDIS, because I can basically, being the designer hath its privileges.

Heinicke: Waves, as her specialty is ocean stuff, frozen ocean stuff, and things that act like solids/liquids.

Johnston: A water molecule, because she told me to and water plays into her geology stuff quite a bit.

Stewart: A plan view of his favorite plane (I’ll never tell which!) that he’ll miss flying while we’re here.

Verseux: He’s got a bacteria/virus thing going on, because he’s an Astrobiologist. And infectious.

Gifford: Being our awesome space doctor, the caduceus! She fixes our injuries and such.

The dome is where we live of course, and Mars is the planet we’re on at the moment. Earth is in the distance because duh, of course it is, and the stars are both the path to and from our home, as well as representative of the Hawaiian Islands. That’s where we actually are (another duh!) and where I’ve lived for like 8 years now.

And “A Year on Mars” because….why would I ever explain that one?

Just getting this blog set up, still have no idea what I’m doing, so bear with me as things progress and hopefully I’ll fill this with art and pictures and stories of ridiculous things that go on as the weeks and centuries pass us by in this little dome on the side of an actually active volcano.

Signing off! The tail end of a hurricane is raining on our solar array so power is dropping, aie!