Universe Encased at Rose Center - Rose Center for Earth and Space - Brief Article

The novel Rose Center for Earth and Space not long ago opened at New York's American Museum of Natural History. Designed by the agency of James Stewart Polshek and Todd H Schliemann of the novel York-based Polshek Partnership Architects, the $210-million center attached to the museum's north side, direct the eyes like a glass cube containing a giant fluid vesicle that is white during the day and bathed in amethystine light at night. The sphere is supported by means of three pairs of steel round pillars in such a way that it appears to flutter within the structure. The glass curtain walls, supported by dint of a skeleton of tubular-steel trusses, rise 95 feet from the one-story granite base. They are made of glass that has been purified to eliminate the usual greenish tint.

The highlight of the 333,500-square-foot, seven-story facility is the completely re-created Hayden Planetarium, housed within the 87-foot-diameter orb called the Hayden Sphere. To penetrate the sphere, visitors travel up a ramp that circles around individual and a half times. The ramp also obeys as the Cosmic Pathway, a 13-billion-year timeline of the universe. In the sphere's upper portion is a 429-seat theater, which uses state-of-the-art technology to shoot forward a virtual-reality tour of the universe onto the dome's ceiling. In the bottom half, visitors stand upon a glass floor around an 8-foot-deep beaker 36 feet in diameter, into which is throwed a multimedia presentation about the Big Bang.

Located beneath the sphere is the Hall of the Universe, a 7,000-square-foot permanent exhibition space which features the 15-ton, 10,000-year-old Willamette Meteorite, commonly the subject of a dispute between the museum and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community in Oregon. The clump says that the meteorite is a sacred tribal thing and filed a claim in November 1999 requesting its go [i]or[/i] come back under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 The meteorite was donated to the museum in 1906 by means of Mrs. William Dodge, who had purchased it for $20600 from the Oregon Iron and carburet of iron Company, which owned the land upon which the space rock was rest The land had been ced by means of Indian groups in an 1855 treaty with the U In late February this year, the museum filed a lawsuit in federal court asking to be declared the meteorite's rightful owner

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