Small Worlds Week Celebrates the Pluto Flyby
July 17, 2015
Small Worlds Week was developed by the SESDA Heliophysics Education Team to highlight NASA’s small bodies mission discoveries. Small Worlds Week was held July 6-10, just prior to the historic New Horizons encounter with the Pluto system. It was a fully online program, leveraging the infrastructure and notoriety of the popular Sun Earth Days website. Each day, a new class of solar system small worlds was featured on the website: Monday – comets, Tuesday – asteroids, Wednesday – icy moons, Thursday – dwarf planets. On Friday, July 10, nine planetary scientists from GSFC, JPL, NRL, and LPI gathered online for four hours to answer questions from the public via Facebook and Twitter. By all accounts, Small Worlds Week was a huge success. The group plans to improve and replicate the program during the school year with a more classroom focus, and then to build and extend the program to be held every year.
