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.

Seventeen-year-old Ryan wanted to understand whether the popular insect repellant DEET, worn by many tourists to ward off mosquitoes, had any effect on the dinoflagellates in these bays. His investigation, outlined in the essay The Effects of DEET on the Bioluminescent Dinoflagellate, Pyrocystis fusiformis, earned Ryan one of this year’s Young Naturalist Awards.