Discovery Stations
These portable carts provide opportunities for active looking, discussion, and hands-on activities related to aviation, space exploration, astronomy, and planetary geology. The carts provide interactive fun for all ages. You can find Discovery Stations throughout the week and on weekends. Below are some examples of what you might encounter:
Popular Culture: Animation Station
Learn more about elements of popular culture that helped to motivate scientists and engineers to boldly go where no one has gone before. Visitors can generate a stop motion animation film with space related toys, find out how one of our artifacts mysteriously "transformed," and compare and contrast science fiction toys from different eras.
Principles of Flight
What makes it possible for airplanes to fly? What natural forces must they overcome to succeed? Explore the four forces of flight (lift, weight, drag and thrust), the laws of physics that make flight possible. Gain an understanding about the nature of aerodynamics that will amaze and astound when you stop to think that it is really air that keeps those airplanes up in the sky.
Rats in Space
Is there gravity in outer space? How much do things weigh in a zero-G environment? What force of flight keeps us down on the ground and how can you measure anything in a "weightless" environment? Learn more about gravity and science in space in an experiment that is out of this world.