Itokawa asteroid

Something special happened a few weeks ago. [T]his is a model of an asteroid. It was an asteroid that was visited by a Japanese space craft a few years ago, it’s called Itokawa. And it’s not to scale. In fact, you’re from the Field which is good because I always use the example, it’s about 500 meters long, if you’re really there, and that’s about the walk from the Adler Planetarium to the Field Museum. So kids can kind of grasp that. […]

Now what happened that was really special a few weeks ago was a school group came in. These are kids that are probably about 5th grade or so, and the first thing they do is run to all these computer screens that we have and they play around with all these visualizations and all these other interactive things. But then there’s one child who came in with the chaperone and he had a cane, he was obviously visually disabled. And I was like, “Oh, what can I do for him, and it was sitting up there for quite some time and all of a sudden it struck me, “Oh, Itokawa!” […] And as I was talking with him, and he was able to touch this, I think some of those ideas actually got through. So in a science where we never get to touch the things we actually get to observe and understand, we had this one chance to take technology and bring it to someone who could appreciate it on a level that we never even get to.

Exhibited by Ken Walczak