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Announcing: the EM2024 “Mission” Patch!

by Hannah Hellman • 2025-04-08

The history of the NASA mission patch begins with Pete Conrad, Gordon Cooper and Gemini 5, a human-manned space flight in 1965. Cooper designed a patch that included the names of himself and his fellow crew member, and a covered wagon. Since Gemini 5, patches have been created forall NASA crewed missions and many uncrewed expeditions. Astronaut crews today direct the design of patches for their missions, and they are still designed and manufactured by A-B emblem in North Carolina. The budding tradition was picked up by the Apollo flight mission crews, including the first human mission to land on the Moon, Apollo 11. It is worth noting that the Apollo 11 (and 13) missions are the only patches to intentionally not include the names of the crew members. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins decided to leave their names off of the patch because they wanted the design to be representative of all who contributed, rather than just the flight crew. Eric Berger, in an article on NASA patches written for Ars Technica, suggests that the crew “wanted the world to understand they were travelling to the Moon for all of humanity”.

When NASA transitioned to using space shuttles for their launches, the patch tradition was solidified further. 135 launches would take place, the last of which launched on July 8, 2011. Each of these flight crews would design a patch, and it was noted that the process of designing and finalizing the patches became a team building tradition.

In 2017, the Eclipse Megamovie 2017 project implemented a patch that Google paid for and sent patches to the large team.

While EM2017 was not NASA-funded, EM2024 is a NASA-funded project, and Principal Investigator Dr. Peticolas requested a patch design from our fantastic graphic artist, Aurore Simonnet. Simonnet began the design process with several different ideas to commemorate the work by the EM2024 team and volunteers alike.The design was iterated on by Dr. Peticolas and Simonnet and, finally, the design for the EM2024 patch was finalized.

When designing the patch, we kept the following considerations in mind:

• Size should be approximately the same size as most NASA patches
• It should represent the total solar eclipse in some way
• It should contain the project name and date of the total solar eclipse
• The text should be legible even in the form of a patch
• It should be beautiful
• It should be affordable to produce for our team members and volunteers

The NASA mission patch is a commemorative and symbolic representation of work done by people to support and execute NASA missions, and the EM2024 patch is no exception. As a thank you to our wonderful volunteers, without whom this project would not be possible, we will be sending patches to many of you as a recognition for your efforts to assist in this project and as a part of our eclipse anniversary celebration. Thank you again, for the varied and passionate work to all those who have contributed to the Eclipse Megamovie project, from 2012 until the present.