The Science Center of Iowa is a

science museum A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in mu ...

located in

Des Moines, Iowa Des Moines () is the capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small part of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines, ...

. The museum opened in 1970 in Greenwood-Ashworth Park and was called the Des Moines Center of Science and Industry. It was renamed the Science Center of Iowa in 1985. It moved to its current location in 2005.

Origins

The construction of the Des Moines Center of Science and Industry was initially sponsored by the

Junior League The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. (Junior League or JL) is a private, nonprofit educational women's volunteer organization aimed at improving communities and the social, cultural, and political fabric of civil society. With ...

of Des Moines. The first location seriously considered was Union Park, a park in the East side of Des Moines on the

Des Moines River The Des Moines River () is a tributary of the Mississippi River in the upper Midwestern United States that is approximately long from its farther headwaters.U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe Na ...

. In 1965, fund raising began in earnest, with an anonymous $100,000 donation and $30,000 from the Junior League. In 1969, the Des Moines City Council proposed, and the Des Moines Park Board unanimously approved, constructing the museum on a 4.5 acre tract within Greenwood-Ashworth Park (the park in which the

Des Moines Art Center The Des Moines Art Center is an art museum with an extensive collection of paintings, sculpture, modern art and mixed media. It was established in 1948 in Des Moines, Iowa. History The Art Center traces its roots to 1916, when the Des Moines As ...

was also located). The proposed cost was $900,000. The Junior League donated an additional $10,000 for the construction of a

Foucault pendulum The Foucault pendulum or Foucault's pendulum is a simple device named after French physicist Léon Foucault, conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. A long and heavy pendulum suspended from the high roof above a circular a ...

, suspended on a 65 foot long wire. The museum contained the Sargent Planetarium, which could seat 135 people under a 40 foot dome. An image of the night sky was projected by a $27,000 Spitz A4 projector. The full cost of the planetarium was $50,000. The museum's first director was Robert Bridigum, the planetarium's first director was Herb Schwartz, and Bill Synhorst was the first exhibit director. In 2005, the Science Center moved to a new downtown location.

Exhibits at the Greenwood-Ashworth Park location

Among the museum's earliest exhibits was a 5-foot 8-inch tall Transparent Anatomical Mannequin. A

Challenger Learning Center Challenger Center for Space Science Education is a United States 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC. It was founded in 1986 by the families of the astronauts who died in the Space Shuttle ''Challenger'' disaster on ...

spaceflight simulator was opened in April 1992. In "The Den" small live animals (fish, snakes, etc.) native to Iowa were displayed.

Exhibits

A new

LEGO Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlocking ...

-based exhibit opened in September 2018. The Science Center's

planetarium A planetarium ( planetariums or ''planetaria'') is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation. A dominant feature of most planetarium ...

has a 50-foot display. The

IMAX IMAX is a proprietary system of high-resolution cameras, film formats, film projectors, and theaters known for having very large screens with a tall aspect ratio (approximately either 1.43:1 or 1.90:1) and steep stadium seating. Graeme F ...

theater closed in 2018 due to storm damage. On August 24, 2022 Curt Simmons, the president of the Science Center, announced that the IMAX theater would not be re-opened, and the space would be repurposed for other exhibits.

References

{{Authority control Museums in Des Moines, Iowa Science museums in Iowa