On the first floor, a 13-foot Fénykövi elephant from Angola sits under the central dome in the rotunda, while the adjacent Sant Ocean Hall is dominated by the model of a North Atlantic right whale. Rivaling the Air and Space Museum in terms of popularity, the Natural History Museum owns more than 126 million items in upward of 1.5 million square feet of exhibitions. The Constitution Avenue entrance leads to a lobby where an Easter Island statue stands guard. Fossilized dinosaur skeletons at the National Museum of Natural History. Udvar-Hazy Center, 14390 Air and Space Pkwy., Chantilly 20. In April 2012, the Udvar-Hazy Center welcomed the space shuttle Discovery, which landed in Florida in 2011 after its final mission. The Udvar-Hazy Center also has flight simulators and an Imax theater, as well as an observation tower from which visitors can watch planes land at Dulles. Open since 2003, the center includes the Enola Gay, the Boeing airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima an Air France Concorde and the Gemini VII space capsule. Located near Dulles Airport, the Air and Space Museum’s annex includes some of the larger items from the collection spread out over 340,000 square feet. Don’t miss the Golden Age of Flight gallery, which includes Howard Hughes’s H-1 racer.

Louis, the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and the North American X-15. Just inside the Mall entrance the Milestones of Flight hall, which just finished a renovation, gives a visual history of aviation by displaying Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. It isn’t hard to assess its appeal-the place is home to the world’s largest collection of air and spacecraft, as well as interactive flight simulators, a planetarium, Imax movies, and more.

More than 8 million visitors frequent the Air and Space Museum each year, making it one of the most popular museum in the country.

Museum of life and science