Mission to STEM

The NASA Glenn Visitor Center is housed within Cleveland’s Great Lakes Science Center. In 2013, RLMG produced 16 interactive experiences as part of the Visitor Center’s major renovation. To further enhance these galleries, we resumed our collaboration to create Mission to STEM, an interactive app for iPad and iPhone.

Upon opening the app, visitors meet a fictional Artificial Intelligence character named CELESTE. Their mission is to help CELESTE build her knowledge of space science and engineering through a series of interactive tasks. Visitors must find six graphic patches, mounted near featured objects in the exhibition, and scan them with the camera on their iPad or iPhone. Each of the six patches offers a different interactive opportunity.

Visitors can explore the interior of the museum’s Apollo space capsule through 360° panoramas; examine the museum’s historic RL-10 rocket engine through an Augmented Reality viewer; experiment with space capsule designs to learn how shape influences a spacecraft’s ability to survive atmospheric re-entry; simulate real experiments done on board the International Space Station to discover how fire behaves in zero gravity; navigate in space the way Apollo astronauts did; and relive the creation, testing, and landing of the Mars airbag landing system. Users must complete all six activities to get CELESTE ready for her first space mission.