On Saturday, June 13, the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center will host Aerospacefest 2015, a fun festival filled with engaging science and engineering activities, film premiere, real astronauts, live animal shows and much more. The event will mark the 25th anniversary of the Discovery Center, founded as the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium.
Special guest will be NASA Astronaut Rick Linnehan, who will speak on living and working in space and present the Alex Higgins Memorial Space Camp Scholarship awards. Linnehan grew up in N.H., and graduated from Pelham High School. He became a NASA Astronaut in 1992.
Members from UNH’s CATSAT Team, Dr. Jim Ryan (UNH), lead engineers Ken Levenson and Mark Granoff, will speak about designing and building CATSAT, the extraordinary team that worked on it and where their lives have taken them since CATSAT.
Special activities include: Raytheon: Math Moves U table, engineering tables; N.H. Aviation Bureau with an aviation simulator, and a new display of aviation art from New Hampshire; Plymouth State University Meteorology Team and Mount Washington Observatory on Weather; N.H. Astronomical Society: Using Telescopes to View the Heavens; FIRST Robotics will have a robot visitors can operate, as well as robotics demos; and Squam Lakes will have live raptors, Nature’s Cool Flying Machines!
A new exhibit will open at the Discovery Center: Roll, Drop, Bounce: The Science of Motion.
And “Space Junk”, a new planetarium show from Melrae Pictures, premieres at Aerospacefest. Narrated by Academy Award nominee Tom Wilkinson, “Space Junk” tells the story of how an orbiting junkyard of cast-off space debris – items like paint chips from space shuttles, dead satellites – have amassed in low Earth orbit to a degree that they are potentially jeopardizing space exploration for future generations.
The event is sponsored by the New Hampshire Space Grant Consortium and the Associated Grocers of New England, and will be indoors except for the N.H. Astronomical Society, which will be on the Discovery Center lawn.
Cost of admission to Aerospacefest is $15 for adults, $13 for students and seniors, and $10 for children ages 3-12. It’s free for members and for kids 0-2 years old.
For more information, visit starhop.com.
