spectrUM

Get blown away by the physics of flight with the Big Air Blower. Fast moving air create lower pressure, causing the ball to magically float! Students observe the fluctuating flight pattern of an object reacting to the fundamental forces of flight.

Climb inside the Flight Simulator and experience the thrill of flight, fun, and adventure. Our ever-popular airplane flight simulator lets visitors pilot their own flight from the nearest local airport and explore the way researchers today gather remote imagery data.

Experience aerodynamics firsthand. Cut and bend paper cups and test the flight capabilities of those cups. It's fun for youngsters as well as adults. The immediacy of results encourages confidence and inquiry!

Visitors of all ages enjoy watching as pocket change orbits our hyperbolic gravity funnel. Enjoy the entrancing visual demonstration of Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion and explore friction, spin, and gravity!

Visitors learn about magnetism – one of the universal forces – as they mold and design magnetic structures with these powerful magnets.

How strong is the power of spin? Investigate the conservation of angular momentum and moment of inertia with our Spin Station experiments.

The Top and Gyroscope Table is stocked with an assortment of spinning things - tops, gyroscopes and optical images. It is an excellent inquiry tool on the science of spin.

Discover why a ring spinning on edge can be more stable that a disk laid flat. Visitors love the challenge of getting disks and rings to stay on edge while moving around the giant rotating Turntable disk.