Sky-watching becomes accessible to all through the “Solar Stones” exhibit, a project by the ATLAS Institute and NASA’s PUNCH mission.
The exhibit features tactile versions of ancient petroglyphs believed to represent solar events, making space science tangible for the visually impaired.
Enhancing Sky-Watching: A Multisensory Experience
Humans have been watching the Sun and stars for millennia, using the tools they had available to record naked-eye observations. Sky-watching is generally a practice for the sighted — but it can now be a multisensory experience.
Students at the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder are collaborating with NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission and the Colorado Center for the Blind to develop tactile representations of two ancient petroglyphs (rock carvings).
The students then created an exhibit titled “Solar Stones.” In this video, the student creators describe the inspiration for the “Solar Stones” project and explain the design and construction process.
The “Solar Stones” Exhibit: Ancient Petroglyphs Come to Life
The “Solar Stones,” exhibit displays two petroglyphs found in Chaco Culture National Historical Park located in northwestern New Mexico.
One has peculiar curlicues emanating in all directions from a central disk, and the other is a spiral. The curlicue petroglyph is believed to represent the total solar eclipse that occurred on July 11, 1097. A large swirl in the upper left of the petroglyph could represent an eruption from the Sun. This petroglyph holds importance as some astronomers hypothesize this is the first known representation of a solar storm in the Sun’s outermost layer, called the corona.
The other petroglyph is around the corner from the curlicue petroglyph and marks a place to stand to observe and predict sunrises before and after the summer solstice — a culturally important time of year for ancient and contemporary Puebloan people.
In this video, the student creators describe the inspiration for the “Solar Stones” project and explain the design and construction process. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Bridging Accessibility and Space Science Through Tactile Learning
“My team really wanted to work on this project because space is normally such a visual medium and experience, but what if you can’t see? How do you supplement that knowledge in an impactful way?” said Kai Hughes, an ATLAS student working on the project. “We thought it would be really helpful to combine history, space science, and accessibility to create tactile versions of these petroglyphs related to ancient astronomy that open doors to people with low or no vision.”
“This project is important to me because I was never a traditional learner,” said Caileigh Hudson, another ATLAS student on the project. “This is a great way to teach people about heliophysics through touch, which is different from the traditional learning we see in schools.”
PUNCH Mission: Understanding the Sun’s Influence on Our Solar System
Scheduled to launch in early 2025, NASA’s PUNCH mission includes four satellites that will study the Sun’s corona and how material in the corona accelerates to become the solar wind that fills the solar system. The satellites will be in low Earth orbit and will produce continuous 3D images of the solar wind and solar storms as it travels from the Sun to Earth.
The PUNCH mission is also dedicated to outreach and student collaboration projects, such as this Solar Stones project. PUNCH’s outreach program is implementing the theme of ancient and modern Sun-watching, which shows how NASA’s exploration of the Sun is a natural extension of humanity’s age-old dedication to observing and predicting the Sun’s behavior.
“Our outreach theme enables us to make NASA heliophysics more personally and culturally relevant to a much broader diversity of people,” said Cherilynn Morrow, outreach director for the PUNCH mission. “This includes our Native American and blind collaborators who work with us to make enriching outreach products like the 3D petroglyph models that are beneficial to everyone.”
Outreach and Collaboration: Expanding the Horizons of Sun-Watching
The PUNCH mission collaborates with four planetariums and science centers, plus other multicultural partners in the Four Corners region of the U.S. (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona) to enact the outreach program. More information can be found on the PUNCH mission website.
PUNCH is led by Southwest Research Institute’s office in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Southwest Research Institute will build the Wide Field Imagers for the spacecraft and will build and operate PUNCH. The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will build the Narrow Field Imagers for the spacecraft and provide optical testing. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space in the United Kingdom will provide detectors and calibration for the mission.