The Science Museum of Minnesota has been tapped to showcase NASA’s research mission to museum visitors nationwide. The St. Paul museum announced Tuesday that it has been awarded a $14.5 million contract from NASA’s science research division to lead a collaborative effort to create an exhibit, videos and hands-on activities that will be provided free to museums and other educational institutions around the country.
“The Science Museum is a proven leader at making science concepts inspirational and easy-to-understand through programs and activities,” the museum’s new president, Alison Rempel Brown, said in a news release. “We are a perfect match.”
The five-year award will fund a new Space and Earth Informal STEM Education project, headed by Paul Martin, the Science Museum’s senior vice president of science learning. Key partners are Arizona State University; Museum of Science, Boston; and the University of California at Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science and Space Sciences Laboratory. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.
The project builds on a previous collaboration created to explain nanoscience to the public. The Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network had received $41.5 million over the past 11 years from the National Science Foundation. It was headed by the Science Museum, Boston, but the Science Museum of Minnesota played a key role in designing and building nearly 100 identical copies of a 400-square foot exhibit about nanoscience, which involves the manipulation of materials on a molecular scale.
The exhibits were provided free to science and children’s museums nationwide on condition that they were ultimately passed on to another institution on the wait list, said Martin. The museum’s exhibit development staff in downtown St. Paul, which Martin said number about 150 people, also created 250 nanoscience education kits. About 30 million people have interacted with the kits and exhibits, said Martin.
With the nanoscience funding winding down, Martin and others pitched the model to NASA.
“NASA loved it,” said Martin. “It has a really great reach and that’s one of the things that was really interesting to them.”
This year, the network will morph into the National Informal STEM Education Network, keeping the acronym NISE, and turn its attention from some of the smallest particles in the universe to the universe itself. The Science Museum of Minnesota will meet with NASA experts and others this summer to start designing the earth and space materials, including 1,000 educational toolkits with activities, to roll out in 2017, and 50 identical copies of a small exhibit, to roll out in 2018.
“We have the capacity to do this that nobody else does,” said Martin. “That’s partially why we’re leading this network.”
The $14.5 million NASA funding comes from federal tax dollars and is a portion of $42 million awarded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in a new effort to improve education outreach. NASA’s science division not only researches space, including the Big Bang and black holes, but also uses satellites and airborne missions to better understand Earth’s land, atmosphere and oceans and changes in our planet’s environment.
This isn’t the Minnesota museum’s first step into space. NASA also funded the Science Museum’s 2015 exhibit “Space: And Out-of-Gravity Experience,” which is now touring nationally. NASA also has contributed since 2009 to the museum’s climate change education programs.
