Hologram of NASA Astronaut Mae Jemison Arrives at NYC's Intrepid Museum

Mae Jemison hologram
You can see a hologram of NASA astronaut Mae Jemison at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.

NEW YORK — Visitors at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on the Hudson River here can now come face to face with a hologram of Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space.

Located beneath the space shuttle Enterprise, the new "mixed-reality" experience uses Microsoft HoloLens headsets to lead visitors on a journey through the history of trailblazing women at NASA — and a holographic tour of the inside of the space shuttle — with Jemison as as a tour guide. 

A hologram shows NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson taking a spacewalk outside the space shuttle Enterprise.

During the 12-minute tour, Jemison's hologram uses holographic visual aids to share many of the significant achievements and contributions of women in the U.S. space program. The featured pioneers include the first women to undergo spaceflight training (a group known as the "Mercury 13"), the "hidden figures" who calculated orbital trajectories for the first men in space and NASA's record-smashing astronaut Peggy Whitson, who has spent more time in space than any other American. [Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts]

While the exhibit focuses on women in space — hence the title, "Defying Gravity: Women in Space" — you won't find only a bunch of holographic women hanging out underneath the Enterprise. Through the HoloLens headset, you can also explore the inside of a space shuttle, watch an astronaut take a spacewalk and peek inside the window of a Project Mercury space capsule

Using a HoloLens headset, you can see the inside the space shuttle Enterprise at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.

"Defying Gravity: Women in Space" opens to the public today (Sept. 22) during the seventh annual Space & Science Festival. The exhibit's grand opening coincides with Smithsonian magazine's Museum Day, when museums and other cultural institutions across the U.S. will grant free admission to anyone who downloads a free ticket. You can get free tickets to the Intrepid Museum here

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.