Audience can participate in ORION meeting on Moon landing
The next ORION meeting will take place at 7 p.m. Monday, May 16.
The title of the program will be “One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew us to the Moon.”
The program will be given by Mark Littmann, a University of Tennessee professor. The program is open to the public.
It will be a hybrid meeting, in-person plus Zoom. The talk will take place at the city Room of the McNally-Coffey Building at Roane State Community College's Oak Ridge Campus. Or people can participate via Zoom, following this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88528735960?pwd=KzY4bnBHcjlhTzg3L3pOcjY0TFovUT09. You may also use meeting ID 885 2873 5960 and passcode 716689
The program will cover different stories you've never heard about little-known people who enabled the United States to land astronauts on the Moon, according to the news release announcing the meeting. The program will be an audience-participatory, dramatic reading that requires no memorization and no rehearsal. Littmann adapted it from the 2019 book by Charles Fishman. Audience members can choose to be readers or just watch the performance.
Littmann holds two endowed professorships at UT, including the Julia G. and Alfred G. Hill Chair of Excellence Professorship in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing, honoring the original founders and owners of The Oak Ridger. The Hills' children, Tom Hill and Mary Frances Hill Holton, both now deceased, were the principal benefactors of an endowment for the School of Journalism and Electronic Media in 1987 to match state of Tennessee contributions to establish the Chair of Excellence and the Science Communication Program at UT. Tom Hill eventually became publisher of The Oak Ridger and he and his sister owned the newspaper before selling it to Stauffer Communications.
Littman is also the author of many books, plays, and articles, especially about astronomy. His most recent works are a book, "Totality: The Great American Eclipses of 2017 and 2024," a book for students ages 8 to 13 titled, "The Sun in Total Eclipse," and a planetarium program called "Eclipse 2017," produced by the Sudekum Planetarium, Nashville, in 2016 for worldwide distribution.
He received a B.S. in chemistry and literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.A. in creative writing at Hollins College, and a Ph.D. in English at Northwestern University.
ORION is an amateur science and astronomy club centered in Oak Ridge.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Audience can participate in ORION meeting on Moon landing
