On the morning of Monday, November 21, the Origami Holiday Tree was lit in the first-floor Grand Gallery by the 77th Street exit. The display pays tribute to some of the Museum’s “biggest and best” displays, with ornaments that include a blue whale, highlights from The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, and a space shuttle as a nod to the Museum’s latest special exhibition, Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration. Celebrating sheer size and scope, these origami models represent some of the largest natural and cultural exhibits on display throughout the Museum. Watch the video or flip through the slideshow below to preview a few of the ornaments. The tree is on view now until Monday, January 2.

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.

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.

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.

On Tuesday, the Museum got a visit from some of the stars of its newest exhibition.

NASA astronauts Michael Massimino and John Grunsfeld, crew members on mission STS-125 to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, joined Curator Michael Shara for a Q&A in the Cullman Hall of the Universe on Tuesday, November 15. The astronauts’ repair mission is featured in one of the dioramas of the Museum’s special exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, which opens Saturday, November 19, and is curated by Dr. Shara.