Zelinskie’s artwork, “Exploration,” represents both the literal and the symbolic achievements of the telescope, and was 3D printed, by Shapeways, using gold-plated nylon. Zelinskie first 3D scanned Dr. John Cromwell Mather’s arm; Dr. Mather is a cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate. Then, she took 3D scans of the arm of Dr. Amber Straughn, another astrophysicist and the Deputy Project Scientist for JWST Science Communications. Finally, Zelinskie 3D scanned her own arm, and combined the three 3D scanned and 3D printed arms with an ethereal-looking representation of the 18 golden, hexagonal segments of the JWST’s primary mirror.
The surfaces of the three golden arms are made out of a lace-like lattice of symbols. The arms are located in the center of the piece, and stretch up and out from the mirror’s surface, “reaching into the unknown in a symbolic representation of the search for knowledge.”Zelinskie explained, “The abstract idea of studying what you don’t know is hard to grasp. This is a disconnect that art can help fill in. Art asks people every day to think about abstract ideas and opens a doorway for creative thinking. My hope is to apply this open mindedness to science and in this way be better equipped to take in the universe in all its vastness and mystery.”
Zelinskie, Straughn, and Mather’s gold arms are all reaching out in different directions, and represent the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric, which describes the universe.
“The equations wrapped around the hands in this sculpture are the ‘FLRW’ cosmological solution to Einstein’s field equations of general relativity, paired with the formula that describes a parabolic mirror. One might say we build one (the telescope primary mirror) to test the other (Einstein’s equations),” Dr. Mather explained.
All of the artists chosen for this project visited NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to attend the James Webb Space Telescope Artist Event, and were able to sit right in front of the telescope itself and listen to mission briefings. While engineers, scientists, and other project personnel explained what the telescope would eventually do, the artists listened and worked, some sketching and writing, others painting and sewing, and even playing music.
You can see more of Zelinskie’s work on her website and her Shapeways shop, and read more about the process from Shapeways and NASA. All of the artwork inspired by the JWST is on exhibit at NASA’s Goddard Visitor Center, for free, until April 16, 2017.“Astronomy by its very nature drives us toward the unknown…there’s something uniquely human about wanting to find out about our surroundings, to explore our world, to discover new things. That’s what astronomy is all about,” Dr. Straughn said of the piece.
While Zelinskie’s is the only JWST-inspired art created using 3D printing, many other interesting techniques were used, including comics, metalwork, letterpress, jewelry making, watercolor, tattooing, and my second favorite, an original and extremely catchy song. Check out the video below to see the project by John Garvey, TheSingingNerd, titled “The James Webb Space Telescope Song.”
Discuss in the James Webb Space Telescope forum at 3DPB.com.