About the Exhibition
November 19, 2011 - August 12, 2012
Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration offers a vision of the future of space travel as it boldly explores our next steps in our solar system and beyond. The exhibition takes visitors on humanity's journey to explore the next frontier, either ourselves or via robotic proxies, which have already traveled to every planet in our solar system. Future missions highlighted in Beyond Planet Earth, once limited to the realm of science fiction but today discussed by leading scientists and engineers, include building a space elevator on the surface of the Moon, deflecting a hazardous near-Earth asteroid, and traveling to Mars—perhaps even establishing colonies there.
"This year, as we mark the 50th anniversary of human space flight, is a particularly timely moment to celebrate the enduring curiosity that drives humans to find new ways to explore our universe," said Ellen V. Futter, President of the American Museum of Natural History. "Although NASA's final Space Shuttle mission ended this summer, the new missions that are being planned for decades and centuries ahead, as well as the scientific discoveries that await us, are thrilling to consider. We are excited to explore these topics in our new exhibition."
"Beyond Planet Earth is one of the most ambitious exhibitions on the future of space travel ever attempted," said Michael Novacek, senior vice president and provost for science at the Museum. "What is significant is that the Museum has moved beyond a retrospective to create a forward-looking examination of our future in the cosmos guided by the latest research, some of it conducted by scientists in the Museum's Department of Astrophysics."
"While we can't predict what the spaceships carrying us and our robots will look like, we do know where we're going, the challenges of getting there, and the opportunities available when we arrive at destinations as alien as anything out of Star Trek," said Michael Shara, curator in the Department of Astrophysics and curator of Beyond Planet Earth.
Before attending the exhibition, visitors can download a free augmented reality (AR) app for iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad created exclusively for Beyond Planet Earth. The app, Beyond Planet Earth Augmented Reality, can be used to activate 11 AR icons located throughout the exhibition, which unlocks animations and allows visitors to share images via email, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to accessing a special site with additional space-themed links. The icons and links can also be found on the Beyond Planet Earth section of amnh.org.
Beyond Planet Earth features a series of immersive environments that offer a glimpse at what the next 50 to 100 years of space exploration may bring.
Introduction: The exhibition opens with a retrospective of historic manned and unmanned space missions: Sputnik1, the first manmade satellite; the Vostok 1 space capsule that boosted Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, into orbit; the Hubble Space Telescope; and a Mars Exploration Rover. Authentic equipment and artifacts on display include a Soviet cosmonaut helmet and U.S. astronaut gloves. A model of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, a spaceplane currently in development, highlights emerging space travel vehicles.
Solar System Theater: A video presentation introduces visitors to future manned and unmanned space missions to Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and beyond.
Returning to the Moon: NASA and other space agencies have identified Shackleton Crater, near the Moon's South Pole, as a promising site for a lunar base because it offers access to resources such as water-ice and near-constant sunlight to generate electricity. Along with a scale model of a habitat that could house four astronauts, this section of the exhibition features models of a space elevator that could be used to transport mined materials and a liquid mirror telescope on the Moon's surface.
Exploring Asteroids: This section features a large 3-D re-creation of the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa and the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft that rendezvoused with it in 2005 to collect samples. Obtaining pristine samples for study does not only help scientists better understand the formation of the solar system, it may reveal the presence of valuable metals. Iron meteorites like the Knowles meteorite from the Museum's collection are 99 percent metal alloy and—like some asteroids—could be mined for valuable materials. Asteroids are also a constant threat to life on Earth: NASA has identified more than 1,200 asteroids larger than 500 feet whose orbit comes within 5 million miles of Earth's. A touch-screen interactive exhibit explores plausible scenarios for deflecting a "doomsday" asteroid.
Voyaging to Mars: No other planet in our solar system is more likely to harbor life than Mars, the most tempting destination for exploration. Visitors will see a full-scale model of the 9-foot-long Mars Science Laboratory Rover, called Curiosity, which is scheduled to launch in late 2011 to search for evidence of life on Mars. Sending humans to the red planet could be the next step, and miniature models in this section show how astronauts might eat, sleep, and exercise during the months-long journey to Mars aboard Nautilus-X, a spaceship designed by NASA engineers. Not everyone is suited for the trip, and visitors can take a personality test to see how they would fare. In addition, a prototype of a sleek new space suit, designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will be displayed to show what an astronaut might wear in the future. A walk-through diorama of the Martian surface and an interactive fly-over simulation, called the Mars Explorer console, gives visitors a sense of what it might be like to explore the Martian landscape. Powered by Uniview software and based on the Digital Universe, a 3D map of the known universe assembled from astronomical data sources that include NASA, the Mars Explorer console allows visitors to zoom in on locations such as the Gale Crater, the landing spot for the Curiosity Rover, and Olympus Mons, the largest volcano and largest mountain in the solar system. Another interactive display, the Mars terraforming table, will allow several visitors at once to engage in an interactive "game" to transform Mars from a frozen, thin-aired environment into an Earth-like planet, a process known as "terraforming." The multi-touch table, produced with scientific guidance from NASA planetary scientist Chris McKay, is powered by a PlayStation 3 gaming system and 66,000 lines of code developed by an in-house team in collaboration with the open-source community.
Reaching the Outer Solar System: Jupiter's moon Europa is another promising place to search for life. That task could fall to a robotic submersible, a replica of which is featured here, that would melt through Europa's icy surface and explore its salty oceans.
Beyond Our Solar System: The exhibition concludes with a look at over a thousand stars that have already been found to have planets of their own. These "exoplanets," detected by NASA's orbiting Kepler space telescope in the first four months of operation, raise the tantalizing question of whether any of them support life.
