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Voyage and Pluto

A conceptual model, sometimes called a mental model, provides conceptual understanding by converting hard to fathom information into something more familiar through, e.g., the use of familiar quantities, familiar rulers, and familiar intervals of time. Some examples used in the Voyage exhibition storyboards:

  • On the scale of the Voyage exhibition, the Sun is the size of a large grapefruit in Washington, DC, Earth is smaller than the head of a pin 50 feet (15 m) west of the Sun, and the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is the size of a cherry on the California coast. The fantastic speed of light on the scale of Voyage is 1-inch (2.5 cm) per second, the speed of a fast ant. Therefore, exploring just the space between the Sun and the nearest star to the Sun—at the fantastic speed of light—is equivalent to exploring the continental United States as an ant.
  • "The Sun is located 150,000,000 km (93,000,000 miles) from Earth” is a statement that provides no conceptual understanding. In fact, if taught in a classroom, one could argue that no learning is taking place.

    Yet if you could travel from Earth to the Sun at the speed of a commercial jet—at 600 mph (1,000 km per hr)—it would take 17 years. To a 10 year old, that’s a learning experience. In fact they might even think that the Sun is far.

    Each Voyage planetary unit contains the distance between planet and Sun in kilometers as well how long it would take to reach the Sun at the speed of a commercial jet:

    • At jet speed (1000 km/hr), it would take 340 years to travel from Uranus to the Sun.

  • The number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy is estimated to be around 300,000,000,000. That’s enough stars to give 50 to every human being on Earth. Enough to give 50 to everyone in your school, your town, your state, your nation, and on your world.
  • Welcome to Ida, a medium-sized asteroid about 40 miles (60 km) across. Gravity is so weak on Ida that you could easily jump as high as the Washington Monument. And the landing would be as gentle as the launch.

    —one of the storyboards for asteroids and comets from the Voyage Scale Model Solar
    System Exhibition, ©2001