Hawaii Space Grant Consortium

UHM PSRD – Website

Program Type: Informal Education

We write, edit, and produce the Planetary Science Research Discoveries (PSRD) educational, online science magazine for a public audience. The web address is http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu. The content we write covers new discoveries in Origins of Solar Systems, Emerging Worlds, and Cosmochemistry based on peer-reviewed publications, making PSRD articles credible resources of detailed information about cutting-edge research written for interested adults and students. The PSRD project helps to address important outreach goals in communicating widely the content, relevancy, and excitement of NASAs missions and discoveries to inspire and to increase understanding and the broad application of science and technology. We write about the science questions that researchers are actively pursuing about Solar System exploration and explained how the answers are discovered and what they mean. We maintain an archive organized by topic of the entire collection of PSRD articles and we are constantly adding new terms to the glossary. The interdisciplinary nature of Planetary Science has made it especially well-suited for raising the scientific literacy of the public. The web site reaches a wide audience and received an average of 45,000 hits a month to articles and 800 hits a month to the glossary in the past year.