Chibi Psyche
Therese Manesia Cook
May 8th, 2025
Major: Physics
Genre/Medium: Digital/Procreate
About the work:
My third project, called “Chibi Psyche”, imagines the spacecraft as a mini cartoon character. When designing this, I drew inspiration from the very cute mascot characters that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has created for its space missions.
I did my best to include the most important spacecraft components I learned about in the design. It was amusing to squish the huge set of cross-shaped solar panels way down into tiny chibi-form. I thought that the big X-band radio antenna on the spacecraft would be perfect to act as Chibi Psyche’s face, and that the two booms beneath it (with Psyche’s spectrometer and magnetometer instruments) could be her arms. The two dots below her chin represent the multispectral imager, and the big gold-and-silver tube on top is Psyche’s DSOC flight laser transceiver. (Also, the numerous little rectangles patterning the sides of the spacecraft–as I finally found out–are things called louver boxes, which help keep Psyche the right temperature as it travels further from the sun.)
To frame the character in the final piece, I added a backdrop of the asteroid 16 Psyche, as well as a cool blue trail of glowing xenon plasma coming from Psyche’s electric thrusters. The rounded silhouette of the frame is inspired by the shape of the Psyche mission’s logo, and the bottom edge of the outline is accented by the mission colors.
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