Overview:
An immersive experience based around a meteorite strike is open at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
On March 21, Spring resident Sherrie James heard a bang upstairs that turned out to be a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite that had traveled across space and time to land in her daughter’s bedroom. This is how several horror movies start, which is what James was thinking as she looked at the glowing, fist-sized rock that had put a hole in her roof and a dent in her planned shopping trip to Dollar Tree.
“I’m thinking radiation, bacteria, or aliens,” she said, standing outside of Fall to Earth, the new immersive exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science housing her meteorite. “It was just like The Blob. I told people they better check on me tomorrow if I’ve got 34 heads.”
The impact made James a minor news sensation. NASA and Rice University quickly analyzed the meteor. No aliens (boo!), just chondrite that is literally older than the planet it landed on (yay!) Its descent made a streaking fireball across the sky as it traveled 35,000 miles per hour, so fast that the air in front of it compressed into a burning fire cushion. Ablation burnt it to a fraction of its size, scattering fragments all over Southeast Texas that were found using tech designed to explore the underground of Mars.
The Museum was faced with a slight conundrum. How do you do justice to the vastness of space, the antiquity of the material, and the near-divine amount of energy expelled by its fall to Earth, when all you have left is one kind of pretty small rock? Fall to Earth answers that with a technological marvel somewhere between a totemic shrine as the a virtual reality ride.
In the small gallery just off the gift shop that recently housed the founding documents of the United States touring for the country’s 250th birthday, the meteorite sits alone in a glass case in the exact center of the dark room, sparkling thanks to shifting lights. The rest of the gallery has been turned into a walk-in planetarium, with the walls and floor showing projections of space, the journey over the Houston skyline, and sites of other meteor crashes.
The result is truly immersive. The only thing it can be compared to is walking into a very expensive video game cutscene, but with an actual piece of space sitting physically right there. The experience is a short and very intense lesson on meteors, impacts, and the history of the solar system.
In fact, maybe a little too intense. The room with its shifting movie on the floor triggered severe vertigo in me. I could only stand in the gallery during still or slow-moving segments. When the exhibit simulated the meteor flying over the city, I nearly threw up.
So, let that be your warning because there isn’t one outside the exhibit yet that I saw. It’s undoubtedly impressive and yet another example of how HMNS goes the extra step in displaying its collection, but it’s maybe a touch too try-hard for some people.
As for James, she’s stoked that her meteor is getting such a lavish showing.
“I’m just blessed,” she said. “I want everybody to see it.”
Fall to Earth is open now and free to the public.
