Editor’s note: This is an in-depth, editorial-style, prose-y description of the museum. All photos were taken using my phone, so I apologize in advance for the lack of complete quality (and occasional presence of my hands).
On Jan 17, a day so cold it almost hurt to be outside, I ventured into the ASU Museum to see the new exhibit: “Sun, Earth, Universe.” The exhibit wasn’t overly large, taking up just a fraction of the museum’s space, but it had a number of activities that kept me entertained for at least an hour.
I started with the topographical map of Venus’ surface elevation, represented with colored wooden blocks. This part of the exhibit took up most of my time, and as I sat there, doing a color-by-number project with noisy wooden blocks in an almost silent museum, I took a moment to reflect on how peaceful the room was. Sure, it was anxiety-inducing every time I made too loud of a noise with the blocks, but completing such a simple, time-consuming task in almost complete silence made me feel calm. Plus, the end result was pretty.
The board surrounding the map contained an explanation of how scientists use color to represent different properties of planets or weather systems. For example, immediately to my left sat a photo representing the mineral composition of the moon.
After this, I moved to the build-a-spacecraft table. A nearby flip board showed some children and their spacecraft designs, but I just stuck a cube together and added the required components on top. The only rule for the spacecraft design was that it had to have a power tool, a communication tool, a navigation tool, and a science tool.
Once I was done building my spacecraft, it was onto the testing portion of the table. My spacecraft survived the spinning test, but wasn’t quite steady enough to survive being shook. I mostly blame this on the fact that my craft was built in such a way that it could not be properly strapped down to the shaker table. Alas, an engineer I am not.
Next, I moved back to the opening table of the exhibit, which featured several questions such as “What would you name a newly discovered planet?” and “What do you wonder when you look up at the stars?” The table also had some cards about the solar system, which unfortunately I didn’t take the time to read. Below the table were several children’s books, also presumably about space.
Next, I played the “Your Mission To Space” board game, which I finished fairly quickly. The goal of the game was to get your question about the universe, represented by a differently colored marker, answered through a space mission. Orange represented “How is the sun changing?”, blue was “How do distant galaxies compare to our own?”, purple asked “Where in our solar system might we find life?” and green pondered “How is Earth’s climate changing?” I chose the green one, moving through my mission of building a spacecraft, launching it, collecting my data, and analyzing it. According to the board, I “gathered data to track rising sea levels,” which I thought was neat.
I then went to the light exhibit, which was probably my favorite portion. There were four black-and-white tiles and four different ways to view them: infrared light, magnification, ultraviolet light, and magnetic fields. I did my best to capture the results on camera.
The next table had pictures of the earth over time, particularly due to man-made causes. The artificial islands in Dubai, the city of Shanghai, and the open pit coal mines in Wyoming showed directly human-caused changes to the earth, which led to the photo of the sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean. “Sea ice grows and shrinks with the seasons, but long-term climate change is causing summertime ice coverage to decrease,” the board read. “At the current rate of decline, summer ice may disappear entirely within the century.”
Up next was a table about the sun, showing what the maximum and minimum of the sun’s output of infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, and x-rays. There was also a nice visual of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The last interactive booth featured a view of what the Hubble Telescope can see at once, which was a tiny dot of light. There was also a tumbler full of blue and yellow beads. “These 10,000 beads represent all the stars we can see from earth without using a telescope. The blue beads show stars with planets that scientists think could host life. But there’s only one star that we know for certain has a life-bearing planet: the Sun, the red bead.”
I took some pictures of some other boards that just had information on them. One was about the Sombrero Galaxy, located 29 million light years away from Earth. Another was about the Sun, which is approximately 4.6 billion years old. The last was about Antarctica, which “may be the coldest spot on Earth,” having been observed to reach temperatures of -136 F.
After I finished looking at the physical museum itself, I decided to look at the website listed on several of the boards: explorescience.org/sun . I was pleasantly surprised to find that the website had several links of information about the exhibit, as well as an audio tour for visitors who are blind or have low vision.
All in all, the “Sun, Earth, Universe” exhibit answers a lot of questions about the universe. But there are still so many things to ask about space. Could we live on the moon? Is there life on other planets? Will I get bonus points in my Intro to Space Science class for writing about this exhibit? Hopefully, this exhibit will prompt young scientists to keep asking their own questions, and maybe, someday, we’ll have all the answers.
Categories: Arts & Entertainment
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