Psyche Inspired: Tommy Desjardins

Standing On Psyche

Tommy Desjardins

Standing on Psyche invites visitors to step onto the surface of the distant metallic asteroid Psyche. Projected across a panoramic wall, visitors see the mission from an entirely new perspective. This interactive environment recreates Psyche’s rugged landscape and the orbiting spacecraft exploring it. The exhibit combines many working theories of what Psyche’s surface might look like. This artistic rendering of the asteroid shows a gravel-like regolith covering solid rocky ground. Craters from ancient impacts with other asteroids form steep valleys, and occasionally reveal bright patches of raw metal buried just beneath the rocky surface. Read more…

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Psyche Lander Mission

TOMMY DESJARDINS

March 30th, 2026

Major: 3D Digital Design

Genre/Medium: HTML5 Game

About the Work: 

Psyche Lander Mission is a short playable experience that teaches visitors about the Psyche asteroid and the associated NASA mission. I built this game with Gamemaker studio, a platform for creating simple 2d games. The project was built for HTML5 meaning it can be played entirely on a browser.

The game can easily be edited to include different information about Psyche, or be expanded to show/explain other aspects of the mission. The simple UI design and controls were implemented to allow a wide audience to easily access the experience. Using only the arrow keys of a keyboard, players get to land on Psyche, move around the terrain, and investigate points of interest along its surface.

For future versions of the project I would love to add more accurate physics to the movement of the rover. That way players could experience the unique low gravity environment and imagine the difficulty of designing a rover that could exist in Psyche.

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