PEORIA MAGAZINE December 2022

S P O T L I G H T

GET TO KNOW THE PLANET NEXT DOOR

Peoria Riverfront Museum planetarium director Renae Kerrigan has long had her eyes on the sky

BY STEVE TARTER PHOTOS BY RON JOHNSON

R enae Kerrigan never gets tired of looking up. As planetarium director at Peoria Riverfront Museum, she’s not only busy planning daily planetarium shows with her staff but regularly pointing out celestial events through emails and YouTube videos, where she has earned quite the following. That was especially true during the pandemic, when she helped take an otherwise closed museum virtual, attracting an impressive 88,000 worldwide viewers to her Facebook live event on the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. But Kerrigan, 33 and a recent 40 Under Forty selection for her work as a “nationally respected evangelist for science, astronomy and the environment,” isn’t one to rest on her laurels. Indeed, she tasked herself with another duty in 2022: Come up with a museum exhibit on Mars. After pitching the idea to museum CEO JohnMorris andCurator Bill Conger last spring, Kerrigan got the green light

billion years ago, the dry, toxic planet we see today might have once been as habitable as Earth.” It doesn’t matter that Mars and Earth are 50 million miles apart. The red planet has never seemed closer, with three robots roving about the Martian surface as we speak, two from the United States and one from China. The photos and other data they send back continue to add to our body of knowledge on the planet. “There are lots of exciting things happening,” said Kerrigan, referring to the steady stream of media stories involving Mars — from news about the Perseverance rover collecting rock samples to aerial video taken by Ingenuity, the little Mars helicopter launched from Perseverance. Then there’s the recent New York Times report that researchers have been remotely scouting Mars to identify subterranean caves that might serve as suitable shelter for future residents. “It would be challenging to live on Mars. People would have to live under

this fall, with the show starting onOct. 7 and running through Spring 2023. That wasn’t much time to showcase an entire planet, especially one as fabled as Mars. After all, from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in 1898 and OrsonWelles’ radio version of the same in 1938 to the work of science fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, Mars has always been that other world we Earthlings viewed with a combination of fear, suspicion and wonder. While we’ve yet to spot any sign of invaders, we have learned that, in the words of National Geographic, “until 3.5

24 DECEMBER 2022 PEORIA MAGAZINE