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December 20, 2014

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Home » Metro » Entertainment and Culture

Shanghai to get a planetarium

LOCAL officials have approved the design of Shanghai Planetarium, which will be built near Metro Line 16’s Dishui Lake Station in Pudong’s Nanhui area.

Construction will kick off next year and will be completed in 2018.

The planetarium, which will be operated by Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, will have domes and curved lines suggesting the orbiting of the moon and earth.

The “three spheres” was designed by an American company and was one of the 13 designs submitted by designers from China, the US, France, Britain and Germany.

“We narrowed down the choices from 13 to 2 — ‘three spheres’ and ‘crash’ which was submitted by a French agency,” Lin Qing, an official with the Shanghai Planetarium Construction Committee, told Wenhui Daily.

“We showed the two designs to experts and citizens, and the majority of them preferred ‘three spheres’ as it is easy to make out that it is a planetarium.”

Visitors will get a feeling that they are entering a valley when they stand under the inverted main dome. The design also includes a dome theater.

The green belts around the main structure are shaped like curves to suggest spiral arms of the galaxy.

The planetarium will have three themes — Home, Space and Journey. “Home” will highlight the relation between Earth and the solar system; “Space” will explain light, gravity, galaxy and the extragalactic system; while “Journey” will talk about the start of life and the development of the human species.

The planetarium will take up a total area of 58,600 square meters — the size of eight football fields — and will be the world’s largest.

It will be the second one in China after Beijing, which opened in 1957.




 

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