The Giovannelli Lab Expedition Badges

Have ever seen the NASA mission badges? Something about the design of those badges was hypnotic for me. It had been hypnotic since I was a child dreaming of space exploration and fantastic adventures in the most remote places of the cosmos. It might have been the intricate designs, the mesmerizing color schemes or the sense of belonging that they evoked. The mission badges released by NASA, and by every other space agency at that time, where fascinating and evocative at the same time.

An example of the beatiful designs of the NASA mission badges found on the internet. Credit: NASA

Fast forward a couple of decades and I found myself sitting in my office in Tokyo at the Earth Life Science Institute (ELSI, www.elsi.jp) looking at the NASA mission badges once again. In the meanwhile I did not quite make it as an Astronaut (although I went very close with ESA last year), but I became a modern day explorer anyway organizing and participating in research expeditions in some of the most remote corner of our planet. That day at ELSI I was preparing for the first of what will become a long series of expeditions centered around volcanoes and the role of subsurface microbiology in controlling volatile cycling. With my colleagues we called it the “Biology meets Subduction” project, and we were about to leave for Costa Rica for the first time. I remember looking at the mission badges and though “Why only NASA? Why not having mission badges for our missions too?”.

And so I asked Katie Pratt and Josh Woods, at the time at the Deep Carbon Observatory to come up with a mission badge for our upcoming expedition. The design Josh came up with is fantastic, and just like that a new tradition was born.

Since then, we design and print on stickers badges for every major sampling expedition we do. The majority of the badges are designed by the talented Patricia Barcala Domíguez, and inspired by symbols, traditions and legends of the location where we go. The stickers look great on our gear, are regularly shared on social media and kids absolutely love them! We give them out everywhere we go to local kids, and I think it is a great conversation starter for impromptu outreach activity done in the field. Sure, in the past we missed a few, but right now we are committed to make it a staple of our outreach activities.

Recently, we have started a special series of badges for our ERC CoEvolve project, inspired by our lab logo and using a variety of shapes. I think that by the end of the project we will have quite an impressive array of badges.

Here you can find all our badges laid out in chronological order starting from the newest.