MGS Logo and Patch Contest
Glenn E. Cunningham
The Mars Global Surveyor project conducted a contest for designs for its logo and its identifying patch during the latter part of last year. Designs were submitted from all over the country--from engineers and scientists at JPL and other participating companies and institutions, and from many school children.
The logo is a symbol that is used for lapel pins and presentation graphics, and will be displayed on the side of the Delta II launch vehicle when the MGS begins it journey toward Mars. The contest rules specified that the logo could be any shape, should be simple, and must convey something unique about the project, such as its initials, name, the outline of the spacecraft, the planet Mars, the symbol for Mars, etc.
A patch for the project was expected to convey more information about the mission than the logo, and would be used on shirts, hats, as a sew-on patch, and document covers, etc. The patch could be any shape and could be designed in color. It could include any of the following/ a picture of the spacecraft, the flight path from Earth to Mars, the planet Mars, the Delta II launch vehicle, and the names or initials of the principal project team members (NASA, JPL, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas). It had to show something in an eye-catching manner about the mission.
New MGS Logo
The contest was judged by the MGS project staff members. All of the entries were displayed anonymously and judges voted for one logo design and one patch design. Judging was a difficult job because there were so many good designs.
As it turned out, the winning design for both the logo and for the patch were submitted by the same person! He was David Seal, who works in the mission design section at JPL. David's designs, which he did on a computer, were unveiled at JPL's Mars Day on January 31st, where he received a special certificate and an MGS tee shirt from MGS Project Manager, Glenn Cunningham.
David's winning design for the MGS logo, shown here, depicts the planet Mars on the left, with the project name and the trajectory of the spacecraft from Earth to the planet Mars (as symbolized by the line from the letter "o" in Global to the letter "o" in Surveyor).
David's winning patch design, which will be unveiled in a future issue, shows the surface of Mars in the lower foreground below a computer rendering of the MGS spacecraft as it flies toward Mars from the Earth around the inner solar system with the Sun in the center.
Return to Cover Page