The Maine Solar System Model
Visit Aroostook
Getting people to the Moon is hard. Getting them to Mars is proving even harder. Getting them to Jupiter or Neptune is beyond current human spaceflight capabilities. But in Aroostook County, reaching the planets in our solar system is as easy as getting in a car and driving along Route 1.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the University of Presque Isle launched a project that some people thought was plain crazy: a 3-D scale model of the solar system spread out across Aroostook County. But this crazy idea soon caught on, and by 2003 a team of more than 700 students and community volunteers had built steel-and-fiberglass representations of the planets in the solar system and mounted them on tall poles in parking lots and potato fields, next to the “Welcome to Presque Isle” sign, and inside Houlton’s Visitor Information Center.
When the original debuted, the solar system model had nine planets and seven moons spread out over 40 miles from Presque Isle to Houlton, but it, like our actual solar system, is evolving. It expanded in 2008 to include three dwarf planets, and in 2025, two more dwarf planets were added. Today a road trip of the model spans about 160 miles from Topsfield to Presque Isle, but as astronomers continue to discover and classify objects in the outer reaches of the solar system, the world’s largest solar system model may get even bigger.
