Presenters: Donn Anderson and John Jennings How do you catch up with a comet? What would it be like to orbit a comet before, during, and after its close encounter with the sun? How big might the comet be? What does a comet smell like? Come find out as we “ride” along with the Rosetta...
Presenters: John Jennings and Donn Anderson Planned for launch in October of 2024 onboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy booster, the Europa Clipper is an interplanetary spaceflight to the Galilean moon Europa. This spacecraft will perform follow-up studies to those made by the Galileo spacecraft during its 8 years orbiting Jupiter. Of specific interest is the...
Presenter: Gary Sohn Next to the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, this was once the second most important United States defense security program. The U.S. was not allowed to fly over China or Russia with crewed aircraft, but the Lockheed D-21—an uncrewed drone—was able to overfly these countries. Attend and learn about this...
Presenter: Gary Sohn The geographic North Pole is a fixed graphic point, but the magnetic north pole has been wandering about the northern part of our globe for millions of years. Find out what causes this behavior and what affects it can have on living things. Location: Space Museum Galaxy Theater Cost: Included with Admission
Presenters: John Jennings and Donn Anderson Landsat satellites have been showing us our Earth from space since Landsat 1 launched in 1972! Developed jointly by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Landsat collects data on the forests, farms, urban areas, and freshwater of our home planet generating the longest continuous record of its kind....
Presenter: Tuesday Docent In the 1960s, two great nations competed to “Put a man on the Moon.” Russia's N1 rocket was in development at the same time as the U.S. Saturn V, but theirs failed. Find out why. Location: Space Museum Galaxy Theater Cost: Included with Admission
Presenters: Donn Anderson and John Jennings The vast majority of asteroids have a variety of rocky compositions. But a few asteroids seem to be made primarily of something really amazing: METAL! The largest of these discovered so far is Psyche. Come find out why we are interested in this particular and peculiar type of asteroid!...
Presenters: John Jennings and Donn Anderson As part of NASA’s Artemis moon program, CLPS, which stands for Commercial Lunar Payload Services, is designed to establish private sector lunar lander services to deliver small and medium sized scientific payloads and technology demonstrations to the Moon’s surface. Come learn more about this plan to use commercial capabilities...
Presenter: Donn Anderson NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security - Regolith Explorer) is the first U.S. space mission to orbit a near Earth asteroid and return a sample from it safely to Earth. This seven year mission to Bennu successfully landed its capsule last September. Analyzing the on board sample will help scientists...
Presenter: John Jennings NASA’s innovative DAWN spacecraft studied the conditions and processes of the solar system’s earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets in the Asteroid Belt still remaining intact since their formations: the giant asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, two main asteroid belt worlds that followed very different evolutionary...
Presenter: Donn Anderson Elon Musk and SpaceX are continuing to innovate rocket development at a never before seen pace. Their Super Heavy booster rocket, with 33 state of the art Raptor engines, is the most powerful rocket ever built. The Starship second stage will take the largest payloads in history into Earth orbit, to the...
Presenter: John Jennings In order to escape Earth’s powerful gravity well, we need rockets. For a rocket to go anywhere, a rocket engine is required. Perfecting the design, construction, and launch of rocket engines has continued to this very day. Come learn about the history of liquid and electrical rocket engines, culminating with the active...
