Sara Schnadt

Mission System Drawings, 2018-2021

These drawings document the transformation of my creative thinking as I became a UX designer and then System Architect for the Europa Clipper and Mars 2020 Missions at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They function as journal-like documentation of key moments in this process.



1. Mission System, 2018
Created as I began to understand the complexity and scope of the design of the mission system on Europa Clipper, this drawing illustrates the intricacy and varying scales of system thinking in the collective process of imagining a new system that will run the mission in the future.

2. Activity Definition for Flight Simulation, 2018
Created during my first system architecture project, for managing mathematical models for simulating the design of the physical and process systems of the Europa Clipper mission, this drawing represents the delicate, diaphanous and idiosyncratic activities that need to be described in math as part of these simulations.

3. Artist Engineer, 2019
This drawing was a critical moment in my creative identity. Before working at NASA, I had understood my creative work as removed from my work in technology, observing and commenting on it via visual and poetic response (as pictured by the drawing on the left). As I became a system architect, I began to experience my creative work in both technology and art as merging together, cross-fertilizing, and coming from the same creative source (as pictured by the drawing on the right).

4. Transitioning Missions, 2o19
This drawing came from a series of images acquired during meditations. The image on the left initially came when I first discovered that I could understand the entire surface of the problem space for designing a mathematical model architecture. The image then evolved as I moved to Mars 2020 for a UX project designing a Science Intent capture tool for the Science Team (represented by the image in the center, my core design skill set). But this evolved into an even bigger and more dynamic architecture project than the previous one, informed by my core UX skills (represented by the image on the right).

5. Spatial Perception of 2 Planets, 2021
This image is from just after the landing of the Mars 2020 rover, when I was feeling a profound disorientation. After working on the mission intensely leading up to landing, and closely with the science and engineering teams, I felt such empathy for the rover and it's physical location that I was disoriented by a proprioceptive awareness of a position on 2 planets at once - one of my own body, and one of the rover. This image came in a meditation, and describes the idea that all of us working on the mission are experiencing our spatial connectedness together across the surface of the earth, and then collectively are finding our orientation on the surface of Mars, where the rover is beginning to explore. Awareness of this collective experience eased my disorientation.