Pluto-Palooza

Saturday marks the kickoff of the PLUTO-PALOOZA national tour, incorporated into the Academy's Astronomy Day activities. Like the 2003 "Marsapalooza" and the 2007-2009 "Polar-Palooza," PLUTO-PALOOZA is a touring event produced by Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, who was a senior producer on the original Cosmos television series featuring astronomer Carl Sagan. The hour-long "palooza" features members of NASA's New Horizons science team presenting a dynamic and richly-illustrated overview of the mission and the men and women who make it possible, telling the story of the spacecraft from launch in 2006 to its closest approach to Pluto this summer. The mission's flyby of distant ice worlds promises to reveal an incredible amount about these mysterious bodies, and about the origins and evolution of our solar system.

Programs at 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM.