Space Exploration
For those who have always dreamed of exploring another planet, the State Museum’s new exhibit brings the dream just a bit closer.
A surface rover like the one used to explore Mars and report back to earth can be seen – and used! – in the exhibit Blast Off! Exploring the Solar System in the New Millennium.
“The exhibit deals with how we humans go about exploring the solar system in the 21st century,” says Ron Shelton, retired curator of science and technology.
There are three basic ways people can study the heavens, Shelton says: with telescopes, by studying meteorites that arrive on Earth from other places in the solar system and by sending out robotic probes such as the current Mars rover.
The Blast Off! exhibit chiefly focuses on the latter two methods.
“Every day the Earth is bombarded by hundreds of meteors, chunks of orbiting debris that make it into the Earth’s atmosphere,” says the curator. “But we only see them at night as ‘shooting stars.’ They can range in size from tiny grain size particles to stony metallic boulders, but most are burned up in the atmosphere before they hit the ground.” They all originate from other solar system bodies – other planets, moons, but mostly from asteroids or comets.
What scientists learn from meteorites (meteors that make it to Earth) include the mineral content of the bodies they came from, the size of the bodies from which they originated, and the atmospheric content of other planets.
“Robotic probes tell us all that and more,” says Shelton. “They give us startling TV images of other solar system bodies, and they carry sophisticated instruments for identifying minerals. Some land and test the soil and rocks. The robot in the exhibit is like the ones that are on their way to Mars and will land and crawl on the planet for several weeks.”
Guests will be able to manipulate the rover model over a mock Martian terrain in the exhibit, and see examples of meteorites in an adjacent gallery. “I hope people will get a new appreciation of how successful our scientific studies of the solar system have really been,” adds Shelton, “and how successful they will be in the future.”
Blast Off! Exploring the Solar System in the New Millenium can be seen in the third-floor Science gallery.