In Providence's own Roger Williams Park, 15 minutes from campus, lies the Museum of Natural History. The museum is three stories tall with a sharply sloping shingled roof, and Corinthian columns flank the doorway and exterior. On the inside, the dark wood interior lobby and the winding staircase lead to "A New Perspective on Mars."
It's an unusual place to find an exhibit about Mars. On the left of the Mars exhibit is a display room filled with Polynesian artifacts. On the right is the room of "Natural Selections," featuring models of birds and small minerals. But just over a week after the exhibit opened on Sept. 12, museum director Renee Gamba estimates that roughly 1,000 visitors have seen the exhibit.
As "A New Perspective on Mars," the exhibit not only displays revolutionary photography technology but also highlights the geological elements of space study. Sponsored by the NASA/Brown Northeast Planetary Data Center and the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium, the show features photos of Mars taken from 2004 until late 2006 by a high resolution stereo camera during the first European mission to Mars, launched in 2003.
The European Space Agency's expedition - the Mars Express Mission - used camera technology developed by the German Aerospace Center that allows viewers to see Mars in three dimensions. Professor of Geological Sciences Peter Schultz, who also serves as director of the exhibits' two sponsoring organizations, explained the camera's technology.
"(The camera is) scanning as it goes around - it's taking images looking in front, looking below and looking behind. This is done on a continuous mode. The net effect of what you see in the exhibit is that you're combining all these things together into a 3D image," Schultz said.
The museum provides visitors with plastic IMAX-style glasses at the exhibit. Viewing pictures of Mars may be old news by now, but seeing the topography of Mars is not.
Professor of Geological Sciences James Head, who helped engineer the Mars Express Mission, attended the pre-opening of the exhibit. "For the professional (scientist), you can't stop looking at it because it's so well presented. It's sort of like looking under a microscope or just being there," Head said. "At the same time, there was a group of waist-high kids and they were just fantastic - they were running around crashing into it because (the pictures were) 3D."
Gamba says the sheer wonderment of exploring Mars - in a museum - is enough to satisfy most visitors. Others pore over the catalogue and written explanations of the Mars Express probe's work. Of the 1,000 who have seen the exhibit so far, many have been elementary school-aged students in school groups.
Hands-on children's activities are set up in lobby, and Brown graduate student docents come in on Saturdays to lead school groups through the exhibit.
Though not as visually arresting as the 3D photographs or colorful as the children's activities, one of the exhibit's more popular features is a set of displays called "Where on Earth is Mars?" The glass cases contain minerals and substances common to both Earth and Mars, opening visitors' eyes to the geological side of space study.
Head, whose GEOL 0050: "Mars, Moon and the Earth" class will make a field trip to the show in early October, is excited about how "A New Perspective on Mars" can educate the public about the anatomy of other planets.
"If you step back historically for forty years or so, pre-Sputnik, planets were astronomical objects. The advent of the space age has given us the ability to transform astronomical objects to geological objects," he said.
This transformation makes space study more accessible to the public, and also broadens the scope of geological studies in an academic or research setting. Schultz, who was a member of the renowned 2005 Deep Impact space mission, which studied the comet 9P/Tempel, recounted his own experience with the geology of the comet. "When you see the comet in space, that's different from seeing the comet close up. When we got to see the surface, we got to see a body to look at."
Given the camera's unique technology, which can take photos in three dimensions, color and high resolution, why are the photographs appearing for only the second time - and in the middle of Roger Williams Park?
Schultz, who strongly believes in promoting the sciences in Rhode Island, wants to garner as much local interest as possible before moving the exhibit around North America.
"The first priority is to let the Rhode Island community look at this," Schultz said.
Though he said he could have easily taken the exhibition to the Boston Museum of Science, Schultz wanted it to be accessible in his own state.
"(Rhode Island was) established by both explorers and settlers. We have this history of exploration. When I grew up I enjoyed those small museums. You have chances to discover things yourself," he said.
The photos may not be garnering national attention, but students still have until Nov. 12 to take a short RIPTA ride on the Route 20 bus and view this arresting perspective of Mars.
From any perspective, Gamba said, the exhibition is striking. "Beyond just the science, the imagery is so massive," Gamba said. "I underestimated what the exhibit would look like in its final state."
