The Museum’s dioramas are famous for re-creating real scenes from real places. But how does one create a diorama about places beyond Earth?

The Museum’s Exhibition Department rose to the challenge when producing Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, the Museum’s latest special exhibition. Throughout the show, visitors encounter a diorama of the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, landscapes of the Moon and Mars, and a room with a model of a near-Earth asteroid approaching from overhead.

This Saturday, November 26, NASA will launch its biggest, most advanced rover yet: the one-ton Curiosity, a mobile laboratory with a two-year mission to find out whether Mars has ever supported life. See a life-sized model of Curiosity in the Museum’s new exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration,then explore how Mars might be transformed into a more hospitable planet with an interactive terraforming table.

Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration offers a vision of the future of space travel as it boldly explores our next steps in our solar system and beyond. Future missions highlighted in Beyond Planet Earth—once limited to the realm of science fiction but today discussed by leading scientists and engineers—include building a space elevator on the surface of the Moon, deflecting a hazardous near-Earth asteroid, traveling to Mars—and perhaps even establishing colonies there.

Find a Mars-bound spaceship, glimpse a near-Earth asteroid, watch a lunar elevator take off from the Moon, and more in this new augmented reality (AR) app created as a companion to the Museum’s exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, which opens November 19.

Long a fixture of science fiction, Mars is now being studied by scientists as a real possibility for manned exploration. And there’s already a body of scientific literature about how humans might “terraform” the red planet, manipulating its climate to resemble Earth’s. The Museum’s new exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, opening on Saturday, November 19, introduces visitors to the topic with a multi-touch interactive table that teaches users the steps of terraforming Mars by putting them in the driver’s seat of the transformation. Below, some stats on how the table came into being.