Rating:
* * +
Type: Displays on Mars and beyond
Time: Continuous viewing
Kelly says: On and off fun, if you have the time
This walk-through grab bag of displays and short films links the explorers of old with those yet unborn, with the vastness of space substituting for the oceans crossed by the Vikings and Columbus. To keep younger kids interested, you may want to pick up an Exploration Passport that can be stamped at various stations throughout the exhibit.
You’ll find a nifty mock-up of the Viking Mars lander in a simulated Martian landscape. Nearby, a three-screen video presentation on the Exploration of the Solar System is perhaps the most informative display here. Farther along you will find a small display on Mars featuring an opportunity, so we are told, to touch an actual piece of Mars. But this is not a sample brought back from Mars by one of those robot scouts. It’s a slice of a meteorite that scientists say originally came from Mars, which to my way of thinking is not quite the same thing. A better idea here is a place where you can leave your signature electronically so it can be transported to Mars on a future mission. Another simple, but fascinating, touch is a curving wall on which the sun, planets, and moons of our solar system are painted to scale to illustrate their relative size.
At the end of the exhibit is a small theater showing Space Race 3000, a fanciful TV broadcast from the far-distant future about a race to Proxima Centauri to test three very different forms of interstellar propulsion — an antimatter engine, a light sail, and a ram scoop.
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