Solar System Tour: Space Lessons in Downtown Ithaca

-Kaitlyn Rich

  In-depth Education Story

This Sunday over 300 people, young and old, went on an out of this world tour of the solar system, all without leaving downtown Ithaca. Residents were lead through the Sciencenter's Carl Sagan Planet Walk by local celebrity scientist Bill Nye "The Science Guy". The walk which included all the planets, even Pluto, was part of the fortieth annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, held at Cornell University. This year though organizers wanted walkers to launch their thoughts toward a new perspective of the solar system. 

"The science of planets, to me, helps us understand our planet and our place in the universe. And that humans, with our little brains, can understand all this is pretty exciting. So lets take a walk!" said Nye to start the tour. The reverberating sentiment of the day was for those involved to take a different look at our solar system. 

"Our goal with the Sagan Planet Walk is not so much for people to take away a lot of facts, although that is a part of it," said Executive Director of the Sciencenter, Charlie Trautmann, "but to get a sense of the scale of our universe and how the Earth is just a small part in the overall universe."

The almost mile long walk started around noon on Sunday in the Ithaca Commons, at the Sun station. The group then passed the other planets on its way to the Pluto station at the Sciencenter, hearing about each planets facts from an expert astronomer along the way. "I hope that everyone can get an appreciation of how much space there is in space - it's empty," said Nye speaking about the scale of the model. 

"They're a wonderful teaching tool, they allow you to see how big our solar system is," said Mark Buie, Pluto expert from the Southwest Research Institute. Besides for drawing an audience due to its uniqueness as a teaching tool, Trautmann added that, "It's wonderful to have Bill Nye and other astronomers. Their reputation really brought a lot of people here."

Along with learning a new respect for the scale of the universe, the weekend was also full of many other activities. "This event today was sponsored by the Cornell Astronomy Department's conference that they're having," said Trautmann, "besides sponsoring the tour they have a lot of other activities." However, the walk seemed to attract the most visitors out of the weekend's events. "We've done public tours like this from time to time but the turn out for this was so good that we should really consider doing it more often," he said.

Overall though the expanding of knowledge of our place in the solar system and the planets we call neighbors was the real purpose of the walk. Some of the most interesting facts came from Buie who, despite the fact that Pluto has been demoted from planet status, still told the crowd all about his specialty. "Well it's a planet to me, and if Pluto wasn't a planet we would have to rewrite the history books because there would be about 40 planets," Buie said.

Similarly, he spoke about the NASA spacecraft heading to Pluto. "The fastest space craft we've ever built is on its way to Pluto, it just past Saturn and it still won't be there until 2015," said Buie, "that's how big our solar system is." The craft left earth in 2006 and will be the first object sent specifically to study Pluto. "I think we should put a little stake in the ground so people can see the progress," said Buie,"so people can be like oh I remember when the spacecraft was on that street."

With the hour long, and almost four billion cosmic mile journey from the Sun to Pluto over, it was Nye who put the days learnings truly into perspective. "The fact that we can see these, by human standards enormous objects and by cosmic standards tiny objects, from Earth really gives us pause to think about our place in the universe."

Photographs: (Top to Bottom) Pluto station, with facts about the former planet and map of Sagan Planet Walk; Crowd gathers around the Sun station in the Commons for the start of the walk; Buie explains facts about Pluto to a large crowd outside of the Sciencenter; Astronomers, including Mark Buie (far left), scrutinize the Pluto station. Many facts were outdated according to Buie.