10th Annual Illinois Space Day Takes Students on a Voyage through the Cosmos

Oct. 6, 2023, 12:00 PM CDT / By William Shen

Students wait for ISD to start in the morning. (Michaela McBride)

(Digital Computer Laboratory, Urbana, IL) The 10th Annual Illinois Space Day was hosted by the ISS Educational Outreach team on Saturday, September 23, led by EdOut Director and Aerospace Engineering senior, Matt Pactol. Over 50 children, from Champaign-Urbana all the way to the Chicago suburbs, learned from volunteer presenters at 10 exhibits, as well as from guest speaker Jerry Zimmerman of Fermilab.

This year’s event followed the theme of “Voyage through the Cosmos,” starting big with the universe itself and galaxies, before zooming in closer to focus on solar systems and planets, according to Shivani Atre, a junior in Aerospace Engineering, and one of the event’s organizers. The students ended their voyage by learning how humans explore the universe with tools such as telescopes and rovers.

“A big part of ISS is being able to convey our passion of why we joined and inspiring the next generation of space pioneers,” said Pactol. “Access to aerospace topics is limited in schools and we want to share what we learn, especially if it'll create interest in the field a lot earlier in education.”

Students paint their planets at the Exploring the Planets exhibit. (Morgan Scott)

Ashley Sawa, Navya Meka, and Hannah Jacobson present at Rocketland. (Zoe Surles)

ISS members presented at 10 different exhibits and led various activities. At Star Eaters, gravity was demonstrated using weights and a large piece of fabric, showing with a two-dimensional simplification of space how mass warps spacetime around it. Exploring the Planets saw students using Styrofoam, paint, and Play-Doh to make their own planets.

Jerry Zimmerman holds up a bag of liquid nitrogen and water. (Komol Patel)

Before lunch, students congregated in the lecture hall to hear from keynote speaker Jerry Zimmerman. Also known as “Mr. Freeze,” Zimmerman demonstrated properties of extremely low temperatures using dry ice and liquid nitrogen.

“Overall, it went really amazing! The speaker and exhibitors were engaging and the kids were able to learn a lot about different aspects of the universe. A lot of that is because of our ISD committee and volunteers so big thanks to them,” Atre said.

Pactol hopes that ISD encouraged attendees’ interest in aerospace. “Many of us have our inspiring moments that got us involved in aerospace and ISS,” he said, “and if we can do the same and grow the curiosity enough even for one student to get involved, then it demonstrates EdOut's success.”