Carl Sagan spent his life chronicling the solar system in books, lectures, and the famous Cosmos television series; almost a year after his death, a new monument inspired by his work is rendering the solar system in stone. The Carl Sagan Planet Walk, a massive outdoor scale model of our planetary system, will be unveiled Saturday in Ithaca, New York, as an educational tool remembering the famous astronomer and author.
"The proportion of our planet compared to other planets and the sun is so small - you can't get a sense of that comparison in the classroom," explains spokeswoman Alison Karrh of the Sciencenter museum, of which Sagan was an advisory board member. "Carl's vision was to teach people about the cosmos, to look into space and realize how small we are compared to it. It was natural to name this after him."
Created by the Sciencenter, the Carl Sagan Planet Walk is built outdoors near Cornell University, where Sagan taught.
The Carl Sagan Planet Walk consists of 10 monoliths - inspired by Stonehenge - representing each of the nine planets, plus the sun. Made of gray stone (except for the sun and Pluto, which are blue granite), each monolith includes information about that planet, its Greek symbols, NASA pictographs, plus a 3-D scaled model of that planet and the sun encased in glass. The monoliths stretch out over three-quarters of a mile, and are built on a precise scale of 1-to-5-billion to give walkers a sense of distance and size within the solar system.
Sagan died on 20 December 1996; Saturday's unveiling is timed to coincide with what would have been his 63rd birthday on 9 November. The launch celebration will include speakers Bill Nye the Science Guy and New York state Senator James Seward, and will be unveiled by Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, who helped fund the US$100,000 project.
