Spring is a busy time for outreach! LPL students, faculty, staff, and volunteers have reached well over 5,000 people this spring semester alone—ranging from introducing preschoolers to “space rocks” to giving popular monthly lectures at Borderlands Brewery as part of our Space Drafts Public Talk Series, a collaboration with Steward Observatory and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

Other highlights for the semester included LPL participation in two events held in Phoenix: Saturday, January 31, at the Connect2STEM event on UA’s Biomedical Campus, and February 1 at the pre-Super Bowl XLIX festivities. LPL students and staff were there to showcase the department's broad research strengths and 500 football and science fans alike enjoyed learning about the OSIRIS-REx mission as well as how we discover and characterize exoplanets.

LPL graduate student Sarah Morrison and OSIRIS-REx Ambassador/LPL staff Jonna Zucarelli show off the OSIRIS-REx mission and how we use spectroscopy to figure out the composition of objects in our Solar System and beyond at Connect2STEM on January 31, 2015.

LPL activity tables at the Tucson Festival of Books (TFoB) were huge hits this year. The department had a strong presence at TFoB's Science City, with participation from OSIRIS-REx (led by Dolores Hill), Teaching Teams (led by Dr. Steve Kortenkamp), and LPL graduate students (led by Sarah Morrison), along with LPL’s Maria Schuchardt as Science City’s Science of Tomorrow tent manager. The graduate students themselves talked directly with over 530 people about our Solar System and beyond!

LPL graduate student Donna Viola wows a family at the Tucson Festival of Books with a comparison of our terrestrial planets on March 14, 2015.

The LPL Speaker Request form has increased our visibility to the community and allowed us to reach a more diverse audience ranging from preschool children to retirees. Keep those requests coming!

We have many more events on the way, so stay tuned!