Psyche Mission Orbit C Notebook
Jessica Gurney
April 3rd, 2025
Major: Astronomy
Genre/Medium: BookBinding
About the work:
Psyche Mission Orbit C Notebook is the third book in the series. Orbit C studies the gravity field around the asteroid, this book tries to capture what a gravity field does to space time with the conical inset. A gravity field bends around an area of mass drawing objects into its orbit. On the cover I added the psyche spacecraft in purple silhouette just outside the gravity field to show it hadn’t been captured yet. The LED’s represent a spherical gravity field pattern, and the animation is the light falling into the asteroid, imitating the direction of acceleration.
To have a cone shaped cover was a challenging feat. The first problem I needed to tackle was how to inset the cone in the cover and still have the book open like normal. I needed to cut holes in the pages themselves centered with the middle of the cone, but because of the way I constructed the page signatures, I couldn’t cut them out individually. Not only would I need to cut 600+ circles, I’d have to do some crazy math to position 2 circles on 1 page that centers would vary by the thickness of the paper. So I decided to cut a single circle in each signature. After ruining 30 pieces of paper to various attempts with machines and craft knives, I had to settle for the old fashioned method of using scissors which didn’t give the crispest edges but it got the job done. The other challenge was blending the cone on the inside cover. When it was first constructed it looked like an ugly plastic thing had smashed through the cover, I needed it to look intentional. I had to create 3 identical pieces of marbled paper to have enough to cover the 2 end pages and the cone. It’s hard to duplicate patterns in marbling, so I chose the stone pattern which worked out better than expected because the seams disappeared into each other.
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