BYO Astrophysicist (Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester
Date:	24/08/06 (207 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some interaction

Disadvantages: Not interactive enough and limited scientific blurb to accompany it

MarsQuest @ The Manchester Museum of Science and Industry



Last week my rocket scientist sister and I visited MarsQuest, a self explanatory new exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. She’s more of a space geek than I am but I am interested in the topic and have a vague knowledge of things thanks to a Sci-Fi obsessed family and an, ahem, GCSE in Physics. She, well, she has a masters in astrophysics, a PhD in astrophysics and currently works as, you’ve guessed it, an astrophysicist. Who do you think enjoyed the trip more? Read on and find out.

The Museum of Science and Industry is not my favourite place in the world. It’s somewhere I would associate with school trips, rainy days out and ‘educational excursions’. We had a quick look round it while we were there and it hasn’t changed much over the years (same old steam train, same old mill scenes, same old bits of old aeroplanes) but the Mars bit was something new, a visiting exhibition that is only planning to stay until late autumn, having arrived this spring. It has an entrance fee attached to it (though the rest of the museum is free) but it’s not too much - £5 for adults and £3 for students, children and other standard concessions. We were there just as the museum opened on a Sunday morning and it was quite quiet, though the rest of the rooms (especially those with the interactive science experiments) quickly filled up. MarsQuest, however, didn’t get all that busy, so you had plenty of room to have a good nosy round.

The exhibition isn’t all that large but includes a few standard museum features (models of the solar system and of various rockets, for example), some cool things to look at (a representation of what the air on Mars would be like, very magic potion-y), some even cooler things to play with (simulations of Mars’s weather, build-your-own Martian volcanoes, that sort of thing) and an immensely fun Gyroscope that I convinced the museum attendant to give me a spin on and which was entirely worth the entrance fee on its own. For those who don’t know (and I must confess I didn’t) a gyroscope is an odd contraption you strap yourself into securely before being spun round and round on various axes of rotation (i.e. upside down and also a bit front to back, in an almost figure of 8 motion). They’re used to train astronauts on Earth, but not being an astronaut and having only 24 hours previously been risking my sanity Go Ape-style it left me a little queasy and in need of a sit down. Luckily, the exhibition had a couple of benches for me to collapse on as I watched my adventure play back on a digicam. We then watched a short film about Mars, played with some Rovers (very boring course unfortunately), felt up some real meteors and then bade Mars farewell. In total we were there an hour and a bit but then we looked at everything. Twice.

From a scientific point of view the exhibition has two main areas, Mars Exploration and Earth-Mars comparisons, and it’s the latter which I enjoyed most as they really help you put things into perspective. When they show you a crater whose area is equivalent to the distance from California to NYC you know you’re talking big. I also liked the interactive quizzes they had in a couple of corners for you to play with (we did, unsurprisingly, extremely well on these), and the ‘find this landmass’ game was really quite fun

MarsQuest is billed as your chance to explore the red planet on ‘a voyage of discovery and space exploration’ complete with ‘fascinating facts’ and an ‘exciting, interactive exhibition’. I certainly learnt things while I was there but most of it wasn’t as a direct result of the visitor information provided but, well, because I had brought my own friendly space scientist with me. Most of the information provided was just too basic or incomplete – some things I already knew and some I didn’t but in the case of the latter I just kept asking ‘but why?’ and, luckily, I had someone with me who could answer the questions. Needless to say I wouldn’t have wanted to take bright, inquisitive kids with me without having first done my homework. However on the flip side the information provided was more of less correct with no glaring errors (though they were still counting Pluto as a proper planet when *everyone* knows it’s now been agreed it’s just a little dwarf of a thing – I guess from now on My Very Educated Mother hasn’t Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, and perhaps will have to switch to serving Nuts instead). On a positive note I was very pleased to spot no cringe-worthy spelling errors or grammatical faux pas and the worst we got was a few Americanisms. The whole exhibition, it turned out, had originated in the States, but the only physical evidence of this was a ‘test the gravity on Mars’ tool that utilised some unheard of soft drinks with American nutrition panels.


Open daily from 10am

http://www.msim.org.uk/marsquest.asp

(a website that is blocked from the free internet portals at the museum thanks to the ActiveX it uses…)

Also:

http://www.marsquestonline.org/

A word of warning about the museum’s website – though it doesn’t lie it does seem to give more importance to some bit of the exhibit than I would, and makes them sound more impressive than they are. An example is “Watch the short video produced in association with NASA, in the mini Mars theatre before moving on”. Translation: sit on a moulded plastic bench in the middle of a room and watch a home-sized wide screen TV as a video plays. “Produced in association with NASA” means very little since virtually films that feature any footage taken from actual Mars explorations, even very briefly, can be describe in this way.

Although not on at the time we went, there is a full program of adults and children’s activities scheduled to complement the exhibition including talks and build-your-own-rover sessions. Some of these incur further charge and a full list is available here:

http://www.msim.org.uk/marsquest.asp?menuid=1169& amp;playanim=false

After all this, would I recommend a trip? Yes, if you have children of a suitable age (say 7 – 12 years). However although it would superbly complement any current school work on the subject, it’s not a thorough enough introduction to the subject if you’re going from scratch, nor would it teach young boffins much more than they probably already know. The question at the start was a bit of a trick because I reckon big sis and I enjoyed it equally, though in different ways, but I only got as much out of it as I did because she was there, and I appreciate that not everyone will be able to lay their hands on a polite house-trained astrophysicist at short notice. If you do still fancy a trip, be quick: the Mars shuttle leaves Manchester 1st October 2006.

Summary: An interesting temporary exhibition but only 3 stars because of issues highlighted