You can help make this Kansas interactive museum USA Today’s ‘Best New Museum’

Among the highlights of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum, which opened earlier this year in Atchison, Kansas, is experiencing a recreation of the pilot’s 1932 historic transatlantic flight through a virtual reality headset.

It is the museum’s interactive exhibits that helped it land a nomination for USA Today’s “Best New Museum,” and you can help decide if it comes out on top. Voting is open until Christmas Day, when the winner will be revealed.

Nominees are submitted by a panel of experts. Editors for 10Best, USA Today’s travel and lifestyle advice section, then narrow the field to select the final set of nominees for the Readers’ Choice Awards. Readers can vote once per category every day until voting is closed. USA Today said the nominees represent the “top openings of the past two years,”

The Earhart Museum is one of 16 finalists for the poll. The other nominees include:

• Africatown Heritage House in Mobile, Alabama

• Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York

• Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.

• The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California

• Gettysburg Beyond the Battle Museum in Gettysburg

• Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco in San Francisco

• International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina

• Jackie Robinson Museum in New York City

• MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts

• Moonshot Museum in Pittsburgh

• Museum of Broadway in New York City

• The Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas

• Rubell Museum D.C. in Washington D.C.

• Telfair Children’s Art Museum in the Jepson Center in Savannah, Georgia

• World War II American Experience in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

You can vote online by clicking on one of the museums and then selecting “vote” at the bottom. The Earhart Museum is in fourth place, as of Friday.

What’s inside the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum?

Inside the Earhart Museum, you can see the world’s last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E, a twin engine, which is the same make and model that Earhart, an Atchison native, was flying in 1937 when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared. The aircraft was acquired for just two cents over $1.2 million in 2016 by the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation.

The museum was the vision of Ladd Mannan Seaberg, who met the restorer of the plane in the 1980s, and his idea was that it would come back to Atchison, Karen Seaberg, the founder and president of the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation, said.

“Amelia chose this plane because it could go higher, faster than any other plane built,” Seaberg said. “She chose it so that she could get around the world, but even with this plane, she had to load it with fuel tanks.”

The museum also has 14 STEM exhibits that are combined with hands-on history lessons that surround the aircraft. One exhibit asks visitors to explore and theorize about Earhart’s final flight. Visitors may cast votes on what they believe happened when the plane carrying Earhart and Noonan disappeared.

The museum is located at the Amelia Earhart Memorial Airport, 16701 286th Rd., in Atchison.

The Star’s Tammy Ljungblad contributed to this report