The original idea to design a poster celebrating the spacecraft mission started around 2007, inspired by a composite of Saturn created by Ian Regan. His original image had a section of the rings cropped off, so I sampled the image and rendered the missing segment by matching each ring color — thread by thread — in Illustrator to complete a full view. 

Then around 2008, I began designing an actual poster of the Cassini mission in my spare time (image #2). That design was never completed, but there are some nice elements in there that didn’t make it to the Spacecraft Series such as the line drawings of Giovanni Domenico Cassini and Christiaan Huygens and the dimentional “Saturn” display type.

A few years later when the Historic Robotic Spacecraft Series was on it’s way to being funded 400% I decided to borrow the overall layout of the 2008 design (image #3) and preserve Regan version of Saturn in the initial sketch. 

The final design is framed in the image below. A copy of this limited edition print (from a series of 275) can be purchased at chopshopstore.com along with more affordable archival digital print versions.