PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Boldly going from Houlton to Presque Isle on Wednesday morning, more than 60 runners made the 40-mile trek by planet hopping through the Maine Solar System Model to celebrate NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and to encourage county residents to get out, exercise and enjoy science.
While the New Horizons probe was coasting through the ether 3 billion miles away, an early morning downpour on Earth’s Aroostook County didn’t stop runners from hitting the pavement at 3 a.m.
A $3,000 grant from the National Space Society, an informal group of space enthusiasts who get together for camaraderie and education, made Wednesday morning’s “From Pluto at the Speed of Light” relay possible.
Experienced runner Evan Graves of Caribou rocketed through The County’s scaled-down solar system, leading the way among fellow Aroostook Musterds runners who had a hand in organizing the run.
Tired and soaking wet from the morning rain, Graves held his son at the finish line while his daughter begged for his attention.
Getting up early for such a run “does a number on my body and my brain,” he said. “That was the longest I’ve run. Going 40 miles is a totally other beast.”
Graves, a marathon runner and a high school physical education instructor and coach, may not be big into science, but says the running part is something he jumped on board with when event organizer and local scientist Kevin McCartney asked him to join.
“Getting kids to be active and getting other people to be active and seeing what we can do to promote fitness in Aroostook County, that’s what this is about,” Graves said.
The University of Maine at Presque Isle’s solar system was built more than 10 years ago on a scale of 1 mile equals 93 million miles, the distance from the Earth to the sun. With most of the model planets mounted outdoors on poles, the system stretches from Topsfield to Presque Isle and now includes the sun, nine planets, seven moons and three dwarf planets. The sun is located inside Folsom-Pullen Hall at UMPI.
On Wednesday, a short distance from the scale model of Earth, an excited McCartney, a geology professor at UMPI and director of the university’s Northern Maine Museum of Science, which maintains the model solar system, greeted runners inside Percy’s Auto Sales where coffee, doughnuts and a New Horizons cake waited to be devoured by hungry athletes and spectators.
McCartney quickly schooled the crowd of runners, volunteers and visitors on how NASA is waiting for hundreds of photos to be downloaded from its probe. Inside the dealership, a slide show detailed the wonders of the galaxy.
“We believe in informal science and teaching science in different perspectives and tying things together,” McCartney explained, saying how it’s important to inspire youth and potentially set them on the path of becoming future scientists.
“If you were to talk to a scientist and ask them how they got started in science, it was inevitably some experience they had when they were 6 or 7 years old and that’s what happened to me.”
Event organizer Jim Stepp took the opportunity to announce that he and McCartney were trying to spread their love for the stars by creating Maine’s first chapter of the National Space Society, already occupying 39 other states.
“It’s very cool to see people interested in astronomy in northern Maine,” he said. “We have some incredible skies up here — it’s beautifully clear at night. Every chance we get people to get outside to look up at the sky and learn more about it, it helps the cause getting people introduced to astronomy.”
Their budding astronomy club will be an outlet for space enthusiasts in northern Maine, and they plan to hold observing nights and teach-ins covering topics from comets to quasars.
“There are a lot of people who are interested in astronomy and anything we can do to promote science is a good thing,” Stepp said.
For information about the club, email McCartney at kevin.mccartney@umpi.edu.
