I popped over to the Science Museum yesterday to take a look at their new gallery, called Cosmos and Culture. It actually took me longer to find the damn gallery than I ended up spending inside it. The visitor help consoles hadn’t been updated, so I had to explore the various likely spots throughout the museum’s endless floor plates.
I finally tracked it down to the middle of the First Floor, directly above the space gallery. It was worth the effort. Although Cosmos and Culture must rank as one of the museum’s smallest galleries, it holds plenty of curiosities for a space nerd like me.
Chief among them is the main mirror from the Rosse telescope. Built in Ireland in 1845 this leviathan of an instrument was the largest telescope in the world for the remainder of the century. Through its eyepiece, William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse became the first to observe spiral galaxies. The mirror looks rather scratched today, but was once the most impressive piece of polished glass in the world.
The Rosse telescope.
Also on show is a full-scale replica of one of the European Space Agency’s LISA satellites, set for launch at the end of next decade on a mission to detect those elusive gravity waves. It’s a large beast, perhaps 20 feet across, but manages to hide itself away up in the corner of the gallery. More noticeable is the JET-X X-ray space telescope hanging like a giant mayfly in the centre of the area. This is the genuine article – a space telescope that never flew. It was constructed in Britain in the early 1990s for launch on a Russian vehicle. However, disruption from the collapse of the Soviet Union led to severe launch delays and eventual cancellation of the mission.
The remaining objects in the exhibition – a jumble of telescopes, armillary spheres, globes, maps and cultural items inspired by the stars – are displayed inside giant cabinets of curiosity. There are no labels. Instead, you find out more by using the touch-screen panels in front of each cabinet. It works really well, although might get frustrating if someone’s hogging the console.
Console in action
It’s a small but perfectly formed diversion, but also a harbinger of things to come. As part of its £150 million planned revamp, the museum will build a huge cosmology gallery up on the roof. It’s the blue thing in the piccy below:
