A scientific learning center

New Mexico Business Journal, March, 1999 by Sue Vorenberg

Cibola County's new facilities will offer a wealth of information about dinosaurs, Native Americans and the heavens

With its plethora of natural parks, museums, natural wonders and three new tourist-oriented scientific and historic projects about to open, Grants and Cibola County may soon become New Mexico's scientific tourism capitol.

Cibola County is home to El Malpais National Monument, which features geologic wonders such as lava flows, natural arches and sandstone bluffs, and El Morro National Monument, which is a massive slab of sandstone that has been inscribed upon by a variety of prehistoric Native Americans, conquistadors and early western figures since the 1400s. It is also the home of the Ice Cave, a cave in which the temperature never roes above 31 degrees Fahrenheit, Bandera Volcano, a 1,000-foot 10,000-year-old volcanic crater, and the New Mexico Mining Museum, the only uranium mining museum in the world. Impressive as that is, the area is about to expand its scientific assets. Possibly the biggest coming attraction to Cibola County will be Lodestar: The Astronomy Education and Research Project of New Mexico, located on Horace Mesa about 6 miles southeast of Grants. The Lodestar project is an education center designed to provide the general public with a place to learn about and investigate astronomy.

"With most observatories in the world you find that they build the research components first," said David Beining, program director for the project. "Later on regular people want to come see it, so they build a visitor's center to placate them, but as soon as it gets dark out, they throw them off the mountain so they can get back to their science. This is built the other way - it's designed for the people to come and to learn and to watch and participate in astronomy. It will create a kind of pride and understanding of scientific endeavors in our country."

The Lodestar project, due to open in 2000, is being constructed through a $15.8 million federal grant appropriation being administered through the University of New Mexico Institute for Astrophysics. It will feature two visitor's centers, one at the bottom of the mesa and the other at the top. At the lower visitor's center tourists can learn about the solar system, astronomic observation and planetary science. The other center features hands-on astronomy exhibits and telescopes. There will also be four dome observatories for the public located on top of the mesa, three with 16-inch telescopes and one with a 28-inch telescope. Located slightly away from the main tourist area will be a research center for scientists, where tourists will be taken on guided tours. A tramway system is also being built to carry tourists and workers at the facility to the top of the mesa.

"The quality of seeing there is amazing," Beining said. "The general public will be blown away by watching the Milky Way rise and just seeing more stars than anyone is accustomed to seeing. The research area is also proposing to do some very innovative work in astronomy research, building new telescopes that will create images that are 1003 times more detailed than the Hubble Space Telescope. The site is probably the best site in the continental U.S. to do this type of research."

Approximately 200,000 visitors are expected to visit Lodestar each year. The project will begin construction after the completion of an Environmental Impact Statement (ELS) investigating the consequences of the facility and concerns raised by the Acoma Tribal Council. The facility is already being designed to blend with the environment using passive solar technology, water harvesting and indigenous landscape materials. The EIS will likely be complete later this year or in early 2000, Beining said.

Another attraction coming to the area is the Dinamation's Dinosaur Discovery Museum, slated to open this spring or early summer. Dinomation will be a hands-on learning center with moving robotic reconstructions of dinosaurs, displays of cast dinosaur skeletons, dinosaur sculptures and artwork, and interactive exhibits. The museum is designed to promote education in dinosaur paleontology and to show the public how dinosaur excavations are done around the world. The museum is expecting 150,000 to 200,000 visitors per year.

Also soon to open is the Northwest New Mexico Visitor Center, which will feature information about Native Americans in the region, past and present, as well as information on the county's national parks and museums. It is already under construction and is expecting approximately 400,000 visitors per year. It will be located across from Dinomation directly off Interstate 40 in Grants.

"If you stop and think a minute you can actually go from prehistoric time, with Dinomation, up through Native Americans and the lava flows and more recent geology, with the Visitor Center to the present, with our Uranium Mining Museum, and into the future, with Lodestar," said Cliford Lear, Grants' city manager "With these we have become, very possibly, the scientific learning center of the nation."