November 02, 2023
Kristin Hunt/for PhillyVoice
The 'Wondrous Space' collections include an interactive display on rover design, which explains the various parts that make up spacecrafts.
The Franklin Institute's sprawling new exhibit on outer space is full of rovers, rockets and interactive games that curators hope will inspire the next generation of explorers.
Opening Saturday, the $8.5 million "Wondrous Space" collection spans two floors of the museum, starting on the ground level and continuing onto the third. The exhibit was designed to be extremely immersive, with special sound piped into each floor and countless educational games that demonstrate the finer points of eating, sleeping and living in space.
Those include interactive displays prompting kids (or adult space geeks) to pick a planet and then jump as high as they can. They'll get a reading on how high they would have jumped on that planet based on gravity and other conditions. Other stations invite users to search for signs of life in a simulated solar system and habitable planets in deep space. The daily life of an astronaut is illustrated through a "space garden" game where players pick vegetables to plant and then watch them grow, as well as a sleep simulation that lets players adjust conditions in a digital astronaut's sleeping chamber.
Adjust the noise, gravity restraint, light and air circulation levels to help an imaginary astronaut sleep through the night.
Chart a safe path for a rover at this interactive station.
There are additional stations where you can design a rocket or space suit, but be warned — if your work is shoddy, it will crash (or crush, from pressurization) upon testing.
"Wondrous Space" also features real artifacts of space and space exploration. Light-up displays contain clothing worn by NASA astronauts, from the inner soles and treads of their boots to the instantly recognizable Advanced Crew Escape Suit, nicknamed the "pumpkin suit" for its bright orange color. A 10-foot-long space engine on loan from the Kennedy Space Center dominates the third floor, while visitors on the level below can peep a piece of the meteorite that crashed into Arizona over 50,000 years ago, leaving behind the Barringer Crater.
A 23-foot sculpture of Mars will hang over the Franklin Institute's atrium for the first two weeks of the new exhibit. The installation, by British artist Luke Jerram, was created with data and images from NASA, including some drawn from the reconnaissance orbiter hovering over Mars.
A 23-foot Mars sculpture by artist Luke Jerram will be suspended in the museum's atrium through Nov. 19.
The 7,500-square-foot exhibit marks a new direction for the Franklin Institute, which is transitioning from 12 exhibits to six larger ones over the next couple years. "Wondrous Space" is the first of this new fleet, replacing the museum's smaller space collection which closed Sept. 20. The next will be focused on the human body and open in 2024, the institute's president and CEO Larry Dubinski said Thursday.
With the launch of "Wondrous Space," the museum will now have space-themed programming on all four floors, from the basement planetarium all the way up to the rooftop observatory, which also reopens for visitors Saturday.
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