See the Crowd Favorite Designs for the “Chips in Space” Mission Patch
The votes are in!
Thank you to everyone who submitted and/or voted on designs for the 2017 Tissue Chips in Space mission patch! Your designs displayed a marvelous range of creative ideas, and they will provide valuable inspiration for the official patch. The final official design will be posted later this fall here at Space Station Explorers, on the submission page, and on Facebook.
Learn more about tissue chips and why they’re going to space.
Two of our four age categories received submissions. The designs that got the most votes are the Crowd Favorites!
Crowd Favorites: Grades 4-8
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Ezra
“I designed it as a mash-up between Emulate’s new S-1 Organ-Chip and the ISSInternational Space Station Space Station’s silhouette shape. The patch shape is the chip outline. And, it looks a bit like a Star Wars tie fighter! Hope you like it.”
Crossing the Space Station’s Integrated Truss Structure with the central microchannels in a tissue chipA tissue chip, or organ-on-a-chip or microphysiological system, is a small engineered device containing human cells and growth media to model the structure and function of human tissues and/or organs. Using tissue chips in microgravity, researchers can study the mechanisms behind disease and test new treatments for patients on Earth. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a multiyear partnership with the ISS National Laboratory® to fund tissue chip research on the space station. is a clever combination!
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Tanalee
“My partner and I chose the Orion Constellation as a chip design because of the Orion Mission. We also chose the Big Dipper as a chip design in honor of my baby sister, Alonna Wood, who was stillborn when my baby brother and her were born. My baby brother is now a surviving twinless twin. The purple star in the Big Dipper represents the star that was named after her through the star-registration.com website.”
What a great observation that the channels connecting ports on tissue chips resemble the lines connecting stars in constellations!
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Kylie
“I want the caption to say: The Sky’s not the Limit! And I want the patch to be a space ship in space with the Earth in the background. And to the left of the space ship I want it to say NASANational Aeronautics and Space Administration.”
With the suggestions in the description and other details, this stock image could be developed into a great finished design!
Crowd Favorites: Above Grade 12
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Veronica
“Uncovering the mysteries of the human body in space”
The young explorers in their soaring spacecraft evoke the curiosity and discovery inherent in scientific research.
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Ashley
“This patch is a twist on Michelangelo’s famous painting ‘God’s Touch’. It is meant to represent mankind’s eternal quest for knowledge. The tissue chip above the hands represent our next stepping stone in this quest.”
A professional designer from A-B Emblem created this fine-art-inspired patch.
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K.
“This design uses sweeping star trails and a beveled design to echo the ports, capillary channels and overall shape of the tissue chips destined for space in this upcoming mission.”
With a unique shape and bold color palette, this design includes references to the chip, the human body, our blue planet, space travel, and of course, the ISS.
Note from the moderator: I noticed that many designs included a tissue chip shaped like a rectangle with beveled corners. This is excellent, but I want to comment that not all tissue chips are shaped this way. The first image you see when you Google “tissue chip” or “organ on a chip” is probably the Wyss Institute’s pioneering airway-on-a-chip, which does have this shape. That chip has gotten a lot of press with the publication of exciting results in 2015 and 2016.