For emerging artists, finding gallery space to exhibit your art can be tough, especially if your art caters to niche interests (like, say, Sonic erotica). But luckily for all you starving artists out there, NASA recently became an art patron by offering hanging space at one of the most exclusive art galleries in the galaxy: Asteroid 101955, aka Bennu.On Friday the space agency put out a call for art submissions that will be carried to Bennu aboard the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft when it launches sometime this September or October. NASA is open to pretty much any type of creative expression for inclusion on the OSIRIS-Rex chip, although it encourages submissions "expressing, through art, how the mission's spirit of exploration is reflected in their own lives."The OSIRIS-REx endeavor will be the first US mission to collect a sample from an asteroid and return it to Earth for study, which will hopefully provide insight into the origin of our solar system and the source of water and other organic molecules that may have made their way to Earth. After collecting the sample, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will return to Earth, jettison the sample capsule and then place itself in a steady orbit around the Sun, where your artwork will remain for hundreds of years.Bennu was the lucky asteroid to be chosen for this mission for a number of factors, such as its primitive composition and proximity to Earth. The asteroid is 492 meters in diameter and is carbon rich, in addition to containing a number of organic molecules and amino acids. Its composition is considered primitive because it hasn't significantly changed since its formation about 4 billion years ago. Bennu completes an orbit around the Sun roughly every 436 days and once every six years it passes extremely close to Earth—within about 186,000 miles.These close passes mean there is a high probability that the asteroid will collide with Earth in 2182, but before that happens the OSIRIS-REx mission designers are determined to study it and temporarily decorate it with your artwork."Space exploration is an inherently creative activity," Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a press release. "We are inviting the world to join us on this great adventure by placing their artwork on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, where it will stay in space for millennia."To send your Sonic fan art to space, include the submission along with the hashtag #WeTheExplorers and send it to NASA at @OSIRISREx on Twitter or @OSIRIS_REX on Instagram before 11:59 p.m. on March 20, 2016.
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