Aircraft departing Portland Jetport may not be taking passengers to the moon, or Mars, but a new exhibit unveiled in the terminal Tuesday may encourage travelers to dream about it.
The new exhibit, produced by the Bethel-based Maine Mineral and Gem Museum, has loaned the exhibit to the airport’s terminal for the next five years. The exhibit displays rock samples from several celestial bodies that most people can only see in pictures or on clear nights at a distance.
“To be able to inspire people to consider that there’s more possibilities than they think they might imagine, that’s the goal,” said Darryl Pitt, chair of the museum’s meteorite division.
On Tuesday, museum and airport staff debuted the new exhibit. “Fly Me to the Moon and Mars” consists of 18 different mineral samples, all originally part of two major asteroids in the solar system, the planet Mars, or our moon.
The samples, experts said, crashed to Earth, presumably after being knocked loose in space at one time. They looked like artifacts from space, some with amorphous shapes pitted with holes like a sponge. Written descriptions explained where the objects came from, and when they were first found on Earth.
Two pieces were the highlight of the collection on display: One was a sample of moon rock, larger in diameter than a basketball at its center. The piece is described as the second-largest piece of moon rock on Earth -- the museum keeps the largest at its Bethel location.
The other remarkable meteorite on display was a two-foot-tall chunk of iron ore weighing nearly 180 pounds. Its nickname is “Scream,” since some say pits in its surface resemble the distorted face in Edvard Munch’s famous 1893 painting “The Scream.”
Its actual name is “Gibeon,” taken from the name of a village in Namibia near where it was found in 1836.
Zachary Sundquist, the airport’s assistant director, said 2.2 million passengers pass through the terminal every year, the perfect audience for the museum’s exhibit.
“It is so uniquely Maine,” he said.
As visitors took in the exhibit Tuesday, the museum’s co-founder, Lawrence Stifler, moved through the crowd, showing off smaller samples from the museum’s collection.
Among them was a small, unassuming stone, rough to the touch, that contained fused particles and fragments from a star believed to have exploded more than 7 billion years ago.
Stifler said one of the museum’s goals with the exhibit is to get visitors to understand how important meteorites are.
“We’ve learned more about the Earth and the formation of our solar system from meteorites and when people get to see them here, maybe it provokes a little bit of curiosity,” he said.
R. Aileen Yingst, a mission scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the exhibit will make far-away objects in the night sky seem more real.
“An exhibit like this allows people to kind of get up close and personal with things that are not just from outer space but are bodies that they can see in the sky, like the moon, like Mars,” she said.