News Story

Living on the Moon’ return to The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2020

Thursday 20 Aug 2020

On Friday 17^th July the ‘Living on the Moon’ team took part in The Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition, an event they were invited to take part in, which was fully online for the first time. ‘Living on the Moon’ exhibited in-person at last year’s event held in London in July, with the exhibit being a large UK collaboration between our lunar group at The Open University, headed up by Prof Mahesh Anand, alongside The Natural History Museum, Manchester University, University of Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London.

This year’s event took place as a video update and an online Q&A, with questions sent in from the public to the Royal Society in the preceding weeks as part of #RSAskTheSpaceXperts. This year the ‘Living on the Moon’ team Q&A was fronted by Mahesh Anand, Sam Faircloth and Hannah Sargeant from SPS, alongside Neil Bowles from Oxford. In advance of the event they also recorded some videos answering questions that came in early, and these can all be found on the ‘Living on the Moon’ playlist on our YouTube channel. On the day, the live-tweeting session was supported by Natalie Starkey of SPS and Sarah Crowther of Manchester University. The team did a sterling job of answering questions that had been sent in and the Royal Society were very happy with the reach of the event, having gone worldwide, and the engagement of the public, including very positive feedback. The @OU_SPS Twitter account saw Tweet Impressions (how many times the tweets have been seen) up over 1300% compared to the previous month.

Leading up to the event, Natalie Starkey also tweeted lunar information on the @OU_SPS Twitter account. You can catch-up with two of the threads here and here, and have a look at Twitter for all of the other tweets.