I was considering doing a diagram on how to crochet simple stitches, or a diagram on how to make holiday drink cocktail. The idea of drawing a diagram on a rover came to me out of the blue. I knew drawing something as detailed as a rover would be a challenge. Though, I felt that my strongest skill in Illustrator is the pen tool and that I could created something that sort of resembled a rover.
I encountered a few hiccups during the design process. The first hiccup was me not knowing exactly how detailed a rover was. This setback my schedule, and I had to work overtime on this project. The second hiccup was after I had finished drawing the entire rover, I realized that I had not drawn the current rover that NASA has just launched into Mars in June 2020. I had actually drawn the NASA Mars rover from over 15 years ago. This rover was also a twin. NASA had sent two identical rovers into space in 2003. It turned out to be OK, as there were still some newsworthy elements with the previous rovers and a lot of good data on it. Lastly, I did not copy-edit as closely as I would have liked. After I had turned in my project I noticed in the explainer I forgot to mention the year that these rovers launched into space, which was 2003.
As for the design, I figured that creating an anatomical diagram of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers would be the best diagram. It was a little hard to draw some aspects of the rovers, because my reference photos were not actual photographs, but graphics rendered in a 3D program. I had to think a lot about depth and perspective.
Because there were two rovers, this gave me more wiggle room with where I wanted to place the information. I wanted the background to look like the rovers were on Mars. This required some tutorial watching on my least favorite Adobe program, photoshop.
Though I am not particularly interested in space, I found searching and learning about these two rovers and NASA’s mission for them quite fun.