This morning, we're returning to Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC to check at least one exhibit - How Things Fly. After last week's great visit
to Exploring the Planets and checking out Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity, Raphael interest is shifting toward flight. "Daddy, how does the plane fly?" And fortunately, there happens to be a great exhibit on exactly that at the Museum! The following description is from Smithsonian's Web site:
How Things Fly
How does an airplane stay aloft? How can something as insubstantial as air support all that weight? Why do you become "weightless" in space? How can you propel yourself there, with no air to push against? These and many other questions are answered in How Things Fly, a gallery devoted to explaining the basic principles that allow aircraft and spacecraft to fly.
The emphasis here is "hands-on." Dozens of exhibits invite you to push, pull, press, lift, slide, handle, touch, twist, turn, spin, bend, and ba
lance. Here you can discover for yourself answers to things you've always wondered about flight. You can explore the nature of gravity and air, how wings work, supersonic flight, aircraft and rocket propulsion, flying in space, and more.
This exhibition is on view in Gallery 109
We also intend, if we have time to check out:
Apollo to the Moon
When President Kennedy committed the nation in 1961 to landing a man on the Moon, America had sent only a single astronaut briefly into space. By the time the Apollo program ended, it had taken the efforts of more than a half-million people, produced the largest and most powerful rockets ever built, and sent humans farther than they had ever gone before.
The great achievements of the Apollo program rested upon many small ones, upon thousands of technical innovations and boundless ingenuity. The heart of Apollo to the Moon is its unparalleled display of artifacts from Apollo and earlier missions that bring this sweeping endeavor down to a human scale. Displays range from a huge F-1 rocket engine and a scale model of the Saturn V rocket to space food and personal items that astronauts took into space. The gallery also displays some of the Museum's great treasures: space suits worn by Apollo astronauts on the Moon.
This exhibition is on view in Gallery 210
Lastly, we're going so early so we can grab free tickets for the following show at the Albert Einstein Planetarium:
 The Stars Tonight
Journey through the stars, constellations and celestial highlights of the current night sky with a Museum staff member using the Albert Einstein Planetarium projector. |
