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Turquoise pin from The Company Store |
The Mineral Discovery Center presently consists of two hexagonal pods capped by copper roofs. The south pod hosts temporary exhibits and our gift shop, The Company Store. The north pod contains our permanent exhibits and Discovery Theater
The Indoor Exhibits
You enter the exhibit pod through a model of a ball mill similar to the actual mills that grind copper ore into powder at the nearby Mission mine.
Visitors enter the exhibits through a simulated ball mill.
As you walk into the exhibit area, you'll come face-to-face with an enormous back-lit photo mural showing an aerial view of the Asarco Mission Complex.
On one side of the room are exhibits that illustrate how the natural processes in the earth form copper deposits and how miners extract the copper minerals from the rock to produce 99.99% pure copper metal.
The other side of the room demonstrates common uses of copper in our everyday lives.
Discovery Theater
Our 35-seat fully-automated theater offers two popular shows each hour:
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The Copper Connection, produced by Asarco, follows Betsy and her big brother as they surf the Internet for her school report on the production of copper. |
The young host of Mining for Music, Sean Wing, explores the origins of musical instruments -- all the way back to the stuff they're made of -- and along the way we find out where quite a few other things come from. |
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Other video presentations include Common Ground, produced by Caterpillar, and Mining the Net, produced by the Arizona Mining Association.
The Outdoor Exhibits
The centerpiece of the collection is a wooden head frame built around the turn of the century. It originally stood over the Copper Glance mine located about five miles south of the Mineral Discovery Center near the old mining town of Twin Buttes. The earliest records we have found indicate it was built in 1908. |
An Insley shovel with a one-cubic-yard bucket and a towed Galion grader are also on display. The grader is notable in that it still bears the dealer nameplate of the Ronstadt dealership that originally sold it in the early 1900's. A part of Tucson for several generations, the Ronstadt family is better known nationally for singer Linda Ronstadt. |
A growing collection of historic mining equipment is located on the
grounds of the Mineral Discovery Center. The equipment helps tell the story of
mining from the perspective of the size of the tools that were used in the past.
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on display are two retired haul trucks that carried 75 and 170 tons of material. The
170-ton truck represents the smallest truck still in service at the Asarco
Mission Mine. (The largest trucks now in use can carry 320 tons!)Picnic Area
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Our desert-landscaped picnic area offers nine tables adjacent to the historic mining equipment display with easy access to the parking lot and rest rooms. A public pay-phone is available here also. |
How Do I Get There?
For directions to the Mineral Discovery Center, click How to Find Us on the menu bar..