Project made Red Oak home to the solar system
Red Oak isn’t the center of universe – at least we can’t prove it is – but there is no doubt it is home to the solar system. You see it along Broadway between Oak Street and the railway trestle any day of the week, thanks to a Red Oak Community School District teacher, some donations, and several students.
Keith Hardy was the eighth grade science teacher in 2007. He was watching a television program featuring a museum that set up a solar system to scale, and a lesson was born.
“First of all, I talked with Barb Sims, who was my principal at the time,” explained Hardy, who is now a Title I reading instructor at Washington Intermediate School. “I got her on board with it. Barb and I went down and talked to (Red Oak city manager) Brad Wright and the planning committee, because it was about the time they redid Broadway, to beautify it. We wanted to give them our plan, tell them what we were going to do, and show them a layout of what it would look like.
“And there was no question about it. They approved it right way. In fact, they helped out with the signage,” Hardy continuedd. “The city actually provided the sign templates and the posts. After that got rolling, I told the kids about the plan. I didn’t want to bring it up to them until we knew it was a go.”
Hardy said the first part of the plan was to scale Broadway down to the distances in the solar system.
“We worked on scaling, and all of the students worked on that in small groups. The sad thing about it is I couldn’t let all of the kids participate in going out and laying it out. So I picked about seven kids, and they were from all levels. We got a GPS system, and we walked down Broadway one day after school, and actually flagged out where each planet should go. We did double-check, to make sure there were no discrepancies.”
Hardy made the planets himself. He purchased bouncy balls at a store for the bigger planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. He then enlarged them to the appropriate size and put fiberglass on them. O’Reilly Auto Parts in Red Oak donated the fiberglass and resin. To support them, he put a rod through them and used fiberglass to the top and bottom to keep them in place.
“On the smaller planets, at first I was going to use a ping pong ball, but I ended up improvising,” he said.
In terms of the scale, the distances are correct, but the sizes of the planets are larger than they would be so people could see them when driving past. Given the size of the planets as they are, if the entire solar system was done to scale to match the size of the replica planets, it would run from the trestle some 12 miles north to Elliott.
Hardy wanted to show that, too, so instead of the small ping pong balls, the actual scale size of each planet is painted on the upper corner of each of the signs, which were made and donated by CR Graphics.
“There’s a bunch of information about each of the planets on each of those signs. There’s so much you can’t see it from a vehicle. You have to get out and walk it,” Hardy said.
It’s an interesting jaunt, about a mile in length. It’s about 20 paces from the sun to Mercury, which represents about an average of 35 million miles. Venus is about another 18 paces and Earth another 16 paces, where it revolves around the sun at an average of 94 million miles. Mars is another 20 paces or so. In just more than the length of half a football field, you’ve visited the first four planets. But it’s three times the distance from Mars to Jupiter as it is from Mars to the sun, and the distances from there are larger.
“My whole hope of this was that the schools would do field trips to them so the kids could get an idea of the distance between the planets. Real quickly, you’ve got Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and then suddenly you’ve got a real big jump to Jupiter and then a big jump to Saturn and so on. And (students) just don’t get that unless you get out and walk it. Every year after that, I used it in my science class.”
Of course, science is not without its own brand of politics – namely the decision to determine what is a planet and what is not.
“We left Pluto up, because a year after we put it up, Pluto went off the (list) as a planet. But, we left it up,” Hardy said. The sign is few dozen yards from the Burlington Northern Railway trestle, across from Nishna Productions, and sort of hidden by some trees. But, Pluto still makes nine, even if it now only represents the smaller planetoids in the outer stretches of the solar system, revolving at an average distance of 3.67 billion miles from the sun.
The Red Oak planets have stood the test of time, and so far, haven’t been taken out by a wayward driver or, worse for all of us, an asteroid.
“We thought about it, but we decided to leave the asteroid belt out. We thought about involving the Kuiper Belt, too, so the kids had to realize that Pluto wasn’t just at the edge of the solar system – there’s a whole other vast area filled with comets and planetoids out there. But we didn’t. We kept it pretty simple.”
Hardy now has a new mission in his teaching career – to help children who struggle to read. But, even though he doesn’t teach science anymore, the signs remain one of his passions.
“I still maintain them. I had to straighten Saturn because of its rings, and I see Jupiter is sagging a bit, so I need to go down and work on it.” But if there are others who want to help, he is all for it. “I’d like to see all the planets get a facelift.”