Arts & Culture
Carving a place in outer space for the humanities

Jennifer L. Roberts.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Eileen O’Grady

Harvard Staff Writer

August 11, 2025 6 min read

The cosmos ‘is as weird and astonishing as any great work of art,’ argues Jennifer Roberts, and navigating it requires ‘a new kind of ethics’

Jennifer Roberts is an art historian whose work orbits an unexpected subject: outer space. Fascinated by images that are created as a way of understanding the unknown, she builds alliances between scientists and humanists — work she finds even more urgent as we enter an age of commercial space travel.

“Astronomers and art scholars should be working together whenever we can,” said Roberts, X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities. “We both know that images are not just illustrations; they are tools for understanding and interpretation, and they have a powerful role in shaping what humanity will do with the revelations about the universe that science is delivering.”

Roberts will publish a study later this year on the first image transmitted from Mars, paradoxically drawn in pastel on paper. In 1965, the 21 images captured by the Mariner 4 probe in its flyby of Mars were being transmitted too slowly for scientists at the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Lab: Each took eight hours to process. Desperate for the first glimpse of the then-mysterious planet, they bought a box of Rembrandt soft pastels from a nearby art store, pinned the incoming numerical data to a wall, and colored by number each pixel, using a color-code system with brown representing the darkest sections of the image and yellow the brightest.

“This is a really interesting story to me because it indicates one of the many ways in which scientists rely upon visualization,” said Roberts. “They needed to create an image in order to understand and interpret the data. And it’s not irrelevant that they used the fugitive, dusty medium of pastel to do it — artists have long used pastel as a visual technology for perceiving hidden or transient realities.”

A real-time data translator machine converted Mariner 4 digital image data into numbers printed on strips of paper. The team colored in the strips by hand with pastels, making this both a work of art and the first digital image from space.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Roberts, who attributes her interest in science and the humanities to watching Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” on PBS as a child, is also currently working on a book about the Voyager Golden Record, which she calls the “most distant work of art ever created.” “The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record,” a collaboration with artist and writer Dario Robleto, will be published by Scribner in 2026.

Her other research interests include the astronomical photographic glass plate collection at the Harvard College Observatory, and contemporary artists like Anna Von Mertens and Clarissa Tossin, who are incorporating outer space data into their work.

Images of space determine how we think about it, Roberts explained, especially the images typically published by NASA such as those taken by the Webb and Hubble telescopes, which are not raw snapshots but carefully constructed visuals made from data that is often captured beyond the visible spectrum. The images are colored, cropped, rotated, and edited to help viewers make sense of something fundamentally unfamiliar, she said. These aesthetic choices are necessary to make the images visible at all, but they can shift how we perceive outer space, often making it feel closer and more comprehensible than it really is.

Roberts pointed to research by Stanford scholar Elizabeth Kessler, who found that Hubble visualization scientists often styled space imagery to resemble 19th-century paintings of the American West — incidentally framing the cosmos as something desirable, traversable, and ripe for exploration.

Roberts says she admires the expertise and imagination that went into these images. “But there are so many other ways to render the same data, and it’s important that people understand that,” she said. “You could have taken the famous ‘Cosmic Cliffs’ image in which a nebula is cropped to look like a rock face and turned it upside down, and it would have been equally scientifically valid. You could have used any number of other colors. It could have been made to look much, much stranger.”

She worries about this when it comes to commercial space ventures depicting outer space as “there for the taking.” Its narrative, she feels, is all too similar to Earth’s most destructive colonial pursuits.

“We’re about to step off the planet and I’m worried that we’re going to repeat all the same mistakes that we’ve made before,” Roberts said. “We are talking about space as a ‘frontier,’ as something to be colonized or occupied. But we should be listening to what the science tells us: Space is as weird and astonishing as any great work of art. It does not support the status quo.”

This is one reason Roberts believes humanists need a stronger presence in conversations about outer space. She’s noticed a tendency for some humanities scholars to dismiss space as escapist or eccentric, and a distraction from Earth’s real problems, but she disagrees.

“We’ve ceded the heavens, in some extent, to the tech sector, to scientists, to commercial ventures,” Roberts said. “It doesn’t seem to be a place where we can exercise our skills. But while we haven’t been paying attention, we have come to the brink of a new space age that is now upon us. Our move into space is going to require a totally new kind of ethics and a totally new philosophy and we aren’t going to be able to access that if we don’t have the arts and humanities involved in close collaboration with scientists.”

“Our move into space is going to require a totally new kind of ethics and a totally new philosophy and we aren’t going to be able to access that if we don’t have the arts and humanities involved in close collaboration with scientists.”
Jennifer L. Roberts.

To put this idea into action, Roberts has begun teaching “Art and Science of the Moon” in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. The experimental seminar focuses on the world history of artistic engagement with the moon, including the response of photographers and conceptual artists to the Apollo program in the 1960s and ’70s. She hopes to teach a similar seminar on Mars.

She’s also starting a seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center seminar this fall titled “Celestial Spheres,” which will bring scientists and humanists together to talk about what’s happening outside planet Earth.

Roberts wants to think about outer space as something more like an ocean in which we are immersed than a void filled with image targets.

“What would it mean if we didn’t think about it as a frontier that we had to cross and conquer?” Roberts said. “What if we thought about it as an ecosystem, something that we are already part of?”