aww, yuri thought ako had replaced her.
wait! i think i just accidentally made a cute and weird version of toy story.
Posts tagged mars rover
who is ako?
i love drawing ako. she’s about 50 million times easier to draw than actual mars rovers (no offense percy, but you’re just so stupidly complicated).
hey, does anyone else feel an unbearable urge to go watch wall-e for some reason, or just me…?
ako’s hero
if the movie cast away taught me anything, it’s that you can totally have a non-living character who’s entire personality is projected on them by someone else. so i’m making it a personal challenge to get at least one person to decide ako is their favourite character, without ever bringing her to life.
that and to eventually make toy akos. i really want a toy ako.
history of mars rovers
great scott! it’s a 5-panel comic! is that even legal?
the history of mars rovers is way too interesting to compress into one tiny comic strip (and yet i tried anyway), so i hope you all go on a wikipedia/youtube binge to learn all the juicy details. the fact that we humans have put multiple science vehicles on another freaking planet is absolutely ridiculous, and i hope we can eventually one-up ourselves and land actual people on mars, ideally some time within the next 2-3 million years. [glares at nasa]
also, i’m officially sick of drawing rovers now. they are actually the worst.
walking my rover
did i create this entire comic just as an excuse to draw sedna taking ako for a walk? no!
maybe.
okay yeah.
confession: i’m really hoping one day sedna gets enough readers for me to justify selling merch… because i kinda want my own ako. remote-controlled and everything.
ingenuity
ingenuity (aka “ginny) still hasn’t flown yet (at least as of when this comic was published), but when it does it will be not only the first flight in the history of mars but any planet outside of earth. and if everything goes well, we might see bigger, more ambitious helicopter drones on mars in the future.
given the perseverance rover has a top speed of about 0.15km/h, i’m sure you can imagine how revolutionary it would be if we could start exploring mars from the air.
surface sample
percy is actually the first step in a plan to bring a martian surface sample to earth for the first time, which will be of huge massive scientific importance.
essentially a mini esa-built rover will collect the samples from percy and deliver them to a nasa-built rocket, which will launch into mars orbit and rendezvous with another esa-built spacecraft which will take the samples and return to earth by the year 2031 if all goes to plan (which it probably won’t).
perseverance
hearing about all the new technology perseverance used for it’s propulsive landing just made me think about how much of a miracle it was we succeeded the first time with curiosity.
but even that might not be as crazy as curiosity’s predecessors spirit and opportunity, which were covered in giant airbags, dropped from 10 metres above the ground, and bounced around on the martian surface for a while until they finally settled in an upright position. and somehow this worked perfectly both times. hey, if it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.
mars rover
so while we’re still living off the high of watching nasa soft-land a science car on another freaking planet (or at least i am), you all get to enjoy some comics about sedna and her little rover “ako”.
given i drew and uploaded these months ago, words cannot express how relieved i am that percy didn’t splatter on the surface of mars and age all my comics poorly before they were even released. thanks nasa. appreciate it.
percy on mars
(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)
illustration day boys! and this is an extra special one! 10.5 hours from this post, at around 8:30pm utc (12:30pm pst, 3:30pm est, 7:30am aest), the rover “perseverance” will attempt to soft land on the surface of the planet mars. if it succeeds, this illustration will be a celebration for percy and nasa’s amazing accomplishment. if it fails, this will be more of a sad farewell. either way, i definitely need to come back and edit this description based on the outcome.
this is possibly the most i’ve ever procrastinated on an illustration. drawing complex messes of machinery is so hard and confusing, i just kept putting it off. pretty happy with the outcome though.
UPDATE: PERCY MADE IT! EVERYTHING IS OKAY IN THE WORLD!!!