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WASHINGTON – On December 3, the National Air and Space Museum will close two galleries – "Apollo to the Moon" and "Looking to Earth" – as it embarks on a seven-year renovation project. Seven other galleries close at the beginning of January.
Most of the museum's major attractions, such as the Spirit of St. Louis and the Moon Rock, will still be on display, but hundreds of other artifacts will disappear. These five are worth taking a trip to see over the next few weeks.
Eyes on the ground: This interactive 3D globe, designed by the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is one of the funniest "toys" in the Air and Space Museum. Visitors can use a trackball to navigate a map of the world using data from NASA's gravity recovery satellites and climate experiments to examine the level of water, temperature, and storms. In a gallery that feels a little dusty, it's one of the few exhibitions where kids and grandparents line up to take a closer look.
Lockheed U-2: Beyond the satellites, this gallery focuses on what it calls "sky spies" and how information obtained through aviation was used from civil war to the Cold War. The plane is above a Lockheed U-2, one of the spy planes that have carried out high-altitude missions over the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States. Other hot spots. (This was the first to fly over the USSR in 1956.) The gallery also includes items belonging to the pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose plane was shot down over Russia in 1960, including his prison diary and a carpet that he came across during his detention. – and later, smuggled his newspaper.
F-1 engine of a Saturn V rocket: To power the Apollo program to the moon, NASA used the largest and most powerful rocket ever built: the Saturn V. There were five F-1 engines 12 feet in diameter each. , generating 1.5 million pounds of thrust. One of these huge engines is on display at the Museum of Air and Space. A mirror system is used to show what a complete table of five would look like.
Images of the Apollo 17 Landing: Do you like to look out the window while your plane lands? This remarkably sober installation is similar and a million times colder. A reproduction of the lunar module of Apollo 17 gives visitors a glimpse of the final descent of the 11,000-foot descent to the moon's surface through "windows", and actual radio recordings of the Commander Eugene Cernan and pilot Harrison Schmitt describe the footage in real life. time.
Lunar itinerant vehicle: The lunar mobile vehicle or "moon buggy" displayed has never been on the moon: the VTRs used in the last three Apollo missions are still sitting on its surface. According to the museum, this is the last test unit. It is "a replica very close to the units that flew". It's amazing to think of this fragile-looking battery-powered device, piloted by an astronaut with the help of a controller, around and leaving tracks in the lunar dust.
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