Giant planets:
They’re closer than you think |
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The 3,500-square-foot national traveling exhibition, called Giant Worlds: A Voyage to the Outer Solar System , welcomes visitors to explore the wonders of our Solar System and its enormous giant planets. They will also learn how their story is our story too. The exhibition is geared toward inquisitive young people between the ages of 9 and 13, though visitors of all ages will find it a memorable experience.
“We’re using the best-of-the-best images from Cassini and other recent NASA missions for Giant Worlds,” said Paul Dusenbery, the project’s principal investigator. “It makes for a really great experience.”
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The exhibit is intimately linked to the progress and discoveries of NASA missions to the outer planets, and it provides an engaging, real-life context for learning about science, math and technology. |
| Giant Worlds invites the public to explore our amazing Solar System – the Family of the Sun. They will learn about how scientists study planets, from Galileo’s early telescope to a bus-sized spacecraft that orbits Saturn, a billion miles away. Each giant planet is a dynamic and changing family of objects including the planet, its moons and rings. Today, exploration of the giant planets is an ongoing collaborative effort by scientists, engineers, graphic artists, programmers, students, and others. |
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Giant Worlds is filled with interactive experiences, models and spectacular murals that reveal the grandeur of these amazing planets. Visitors can learn about gravity in a simulation that assigns a mass to the visitor’s shadow and demonstrates how particles, such as those in Saturn’s spectacular ring system, interact with the shadow. They can design and launch a virtual probe into Jupiter’s crushing atmosphere and see how far their probe gets before it is destroyed. Visitors can also experiment with the properties of visible and infrared radiation and learn how scientists use light to probe phenomena like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
“The giant worlds are all mini-solar systems,” Dusenbery said. “These interactive experiences are designed to bring these systems to life.”
SSI is collaborating with educators and scientists to create an education program to accompany the exhibit that consists of workshops for museum educators and teachers, and various outreach programs. SSI is also creating a virtual exhibit website for the project that extends the exhibit’s scope and reach and provides resources and dissemination for the education program.
Giant Worlds was produced by the Space Science Institute of Boulder, Colorado with $1.8M in funding from the National Science Foundation. Partners include NASA’s Cassini and Juno missions . The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) will manage the national tour .
“It’s truly amazing how important a role Jupiter has played in our Solar System,” Dusenbery said. “So, as we’re constantly finding new giant worlds orbiting other stars, maybe these worlds play as important a role in their systems as ours do here.”
For more information on Giant Worlds: A Voyage to the Outer Solar System visit www.giantworlds.org. |
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