THE "Where Next, Columbus?" EXHIBITION IS CLOSED
The following is provided for information purposes only.

Five hundred years ago, Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic, using the stars to guide him. Today, modern explorers are charting a course that may eventually take humanity out among the stars themselves. How and why have we come from seafaring to spacefaring? What challenges and choices do we face now? The Where Next, Columbus? exhibition asks visitors to consider the motives and methods of exploration, as well as the options and possibilities for future space exploration.

The exhibit was divided into three sections:

• "Exploring This World"
• "Exploring New Worlds"
• "To The Stars"

158k GIF - 76k JPEG Smithsonian Institution photograph by C. Russo Do not use without written permission.

This first section of the exhibition, "Exploring This World", walked through the past 500 years of exploration - Spain's Enterprise of the Indies, the young United States' Corps of Discovery to the West, and the Cold War era American mission to the Moon - are shown on one side of the entryway. These examples illuminate the motives, technologies, risks, costs, and results of exploration. On the opposite side, the changing conception of this world as revealed through key maps of the past 500 years, as well as our changing conception of the universe as revealed through cosmographical diagrams and astronomical images, is shown. Today neither this world nor the universe at large bears much resemblance to the concepts of 500 years ago. Exploration - by traveling to places and by observing them from a distance - has had tremendous impact.

"Challenges for Space Explorers" bridges the past and future. A setting that suggested a spaceship allowed visitors to consider physiological effects of weightlessness such as muscle atrophy and bone calcium loss, the radiation risk to space travelers, and options for faster or more efficient space transportation systems.

The focus of this area was an interactive video program that asks the question, "Why Explore?" Visitors considered a variety of opinions - positive and negative - about motives for exploration today.

The exhibition's next section was a 3,000 square-foot simulated Martian landscape. Visitors followed paths in a valley on Mars; steep canyon walls rise to the ceiling on two sides, and a vista across the valley opens in murals on two walls. Visitors may follow either or both paths through the Mars site. The theme of one path is robotic exploration, and of the other, human.

[76k JPEG] - [153k GIF]
Full-scale rover "Sojourner"
Smithsonian Institution photograph #97-15001
Do not use without written permission.

During the mission, two video monitors displayed the latest NASA/JPL Mars Pathfinder imagery taken by the spacecraft and rover cameras. Recent meteorological data gathered by instruments on the Mars Pathfinder lander were also displayed.

An interactive video allowed visitors to plot a robotic mission to Mars.

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"Presidential Panorama"
NASA/JPL Image #81732

A fourteen-foot wide version of this "Presidential Panorama", taken by the Mars Pathfinder IMP camera, was on display at the Museum during the Mars Pathfinder mission from July - October 1997.

This area concluded with a display about the environmental ethics of exploring new worlds, and particularly the concept of altering other environments (terraforming) to make them more habitable.

As visitors left the Mars site, they could enter a small theater to view three short films produced for the exhibition: a computer-animated tour of our solar system in "Otherworlds"; a claymation Albert Einstein, using movie clips to separate science fiction from science fact, in "Spacefaring"; and movie encounters with aliens, exploring stereotypes that reveal some assumptions we make about ourselves and others in "Contact!".

The third and final section shifted our scale of distance and time from the solar system to the galaxy. At the entrance to this area, a uniquely accurate mural of the Milky Way leads into a room-sized model of our neighborhood in the galaxy: a three-dimensional stellarium shows the locations and magnitude of more than 700 stars within 50 light years of the Sun. The stellarium prompted visitors to realize how much more vast the distances are between stars than planets, how much more challenging the prospects are for interstellar travel compared to planetary travel, and how we may explore by means other than travel.

Highlights of the "Stars" portion of the gallery included a display tracing the history of scientists' efforts to "listen" with powerful radio telescopes for signs of life elsewhere in the universe, and an interactive computer video for estimating the probability that other civilizations exist in the galaxy.

Before exiting the gallery, visitors could pause at a public opinion poll to consider some questions about future exploration.

The portal at the entrance to the gallery framed an image of our planet as seen from space. This is an image of cloudless Earth, assembled pixel by pixel from years of satellite data by a team that includes a scientist, an artist, and a high-speed computer.