A Comet Lands in Brooklyn | StudioKCA

A few months ago, the European Space Agency (ESA), the World Science festival, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, asked STUDIOKCA's principals Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang to create an installation to celebrate the "Rosetta Mission", a mission to land a spacecraft the size of a dishwasher, on a comet the size of central park, nearly 400 million miles away from Earth.  

What they designed, with visual strategy from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, is a 1:1000 scale concept of the comet’s nucleus and Ion tail, just as its’ cratered surface begins to heat up in the sun, and burst apart.  

Jason, Lesley, and team built half of the nucleus out of 67 folded steel plates, blackened and "cratered" using a waterjet cutter, hammers ("cosmic hammers") and torches.  They set the metal half into a reflecting pool to create the other half of the nucleus in reflection (Some scientists believe comets are mostly ice, and a collision with Earth millenniums ago, is how we came to have water on our planet).  They wired the inside with 600 watts of LED’s and ran nearly 100 feet of copper tubes and misters to create the comet’s ion tail.  The light and mist, reflected in the water and pouring out of the steel surface, creates what they imagine the nucleus of the comet might look like at the moment the Rosetta mission spacecraft rendezvous’ with it.   The piece measures 9’x12’x8’, and has a tail of mist and water 53’ long.

STUDIOKCA's comet first landed at New York's Brooklyn Bridge Park and has been traveling to different sites all over the world for the last year. Its next landing location is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.