Over 1,000 visitors at SRON open days

Over 1,000 people of all ages visited the open days of SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Groningen and Leiden in 2023. The open days, on Sunday October 1st in Groningen and on Saturday October 7th in Leiden, introduced visitors of all ages to space research.

We organised the open day in Groningen together with the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, the Astronomy research institute of the University of Groningen.

Science in space

In lectures, scientists from SRON and Kapteyn explained how they do their research using ours – and others’ – instruments on space telescopes and satellites from NASA, ESA and JAXA.
For example, about researching exoplanets, air pollution, the birth of stars, and unimaginably hot gas blowing giant bubbles into space.

Kids and space

Children, who ask the most wonderful questions, learned more about what goes on in space, as well as how to unravel those secrets, with a visit to the planetarium. Children could also learn to solder, make their own spectrometer or eat an ice cream that got cooled with nitrogen (just like our super sensitive detectors).

Space instruments

Our system engineers, mechanical engineers and instrument builders were happy to use experiments and examples to demonstrate the design, making and testing of instruments for telescopes and satellites.

For example, what information you can extract from light. And how they design (ice-cold) detectors that are very sensitive to do this. And how they design and build instruments that protect the sensitive detectors from too much heat, cold, unwanted light, launches and cosmic radiation.

Science festival

The open day in Groningen with the Kapteyn Institute was part of the Groningen science festival Zpannend Zernike.
The open day in Leiden was part of the Weekend van de Wetenschap and The SpaceweekNL.