Cosmonautics Day in Penza Regional Centre of Presidential Library

On the eve of Cosmonautics Day the staff of the Penza Regional Centre of the Presidential Library based on the M. Y. Lermontov Penza Regional Library, traditionally holds events for schoolchildren devoted to the history of space exploration.

On 11 April the library was visited by pupils of secondary school No. 68 with advanced study of computer science. The children were introduced to the biography of the founder of modern cosmonautics K.E. Tsiolkovsky, told about facts from his life, the main scientific discoveries and inventions. Pages from books from the Presidential Library's portal with drawings of Tsiolkovsky's airship and "bird-like flying machine" supplemented the story.

Interesting information about the launch of the first satellite, the flight of Belka and Strelka, and the launch of the Vostok spaceship continued the multimedia lesson.

A fragment of archive newsreel made on 12 April 1961 made a great impression on the schoolchildren: shots with the chief designer Sergey Korolev, the cosmonaut's ascent into the rocket, Yuri Gagarin sending greetings to all inhabitants of the planet. Inquisitive young readers answered questions about where Gagarin studied, where the descent vehicle landed, etc. The materials of the electronic collection Outer Space presented on the Presidential Library portal will help to enrich their knowledge about the history of space exploration.

At the event the students were told about the structure of the solar system, what asteroids and meteorites are, where comets come from, how many constellations there are in the sky, why dark spots on the moon are called seas.

Young guests assembled a model of the solar system, performed astronauts' exercises and even chatted with "aliens". The children were interested in interactive books about space, on the pages of which rockets and moon rovers "come to life", planets and their satellites rotate.

The Presidential Library portal offers the collection Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) dedicated to the founder of theoretical cosmonautics, who first substantiated the possibility of interplanetary communications and the use of rockets for this purpose. The collection includes publications devoted to Tsiolkovsky's life, his works on the theory of air and starflight, rocket construction, astronomy, physics, biology, as well as philosophical and science fiction works.