Area museum is ready to take visitors ‘Beyond Planet Earth’

Ever wonder what the moon smells like?

It doesn’t, because there is no atmosphere to carry an odor. But when lunar astronauts brought rocks and dust inside their spaceship, they realized the moon smells something like gunpowder.

Visitors to a new exhibit opening Saturday at the Museum at Prairiefire can get a sense of that smell. They also can blow up an asteroid hurtling toward Earth — on a simulation screen — and explore the Red Planet Mars.

Those are among the many interactive elements in “Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration,” an exhibit created by the American Museum of Natural History and on display at Prairiefire in Overland Park through Feb. 12.

It contains life-size replicas of spacecraft, from the pioneering Russian satellite Sputnik to the American Mars rover Curiosity. And it depicts what may be the future of space travel, from inflatable habitats to a “lunar elevator” that would make it possible to deploy people and cargo to the moon’s surface and back without landing on it.

A handful of objects are not replicas but the real thing, including a cosmonaut’s glove and the wire mesh tire of a lunar rover.

On Friday, Chanelle Johnson of Kansas City was touching up the rocks and red dirt in the Curiosity diorama, which tends to take a beating during transport.

“We’re resurfacing Mars!” Johnson joked. “It’s really fun.”

The Museum at Prairiefire has an “urban advantage” program in which underserved elementary students are provided with free field trips and transportation to the museum.

“We bring them out here and we take them through this exhibit and we open their eyes to the sciences, the technology, the engineering, all these wonderful things that go into space exploration and what’s next,” said Terri Thompson, director of community engagement at the museum.

“Beyond Planet Earth” is forward looking to the next 50 to 100 years of space exploration.

“Space is big,” said museum education coordinator Ian Clark, “but basically we can, at this point, start developing ways that were once just fiction and we can actually explore places that we never thoguht possible. And the universe might become a smaller place.”

This story was originally published September 29, 2017 at 4:20 PM with the headline "Area museum is ready to take visitors ‘Beyond Planet Earth’."