WESTFIELD – The largest county east of the Mississippi River is now home to the largest scale model of the solar system in the world.

Stretching 40.1 miles along Route 1 from Presque Isle to Houlton, the Maine Solar System Model was officially dedicated Saturday at the site of the Saturn model.

“It’s a really fine model and it’s ours,” professor Kevin McCartney of the University of Maine at Presque Isle told a crowd of nearly 100 people who turned out for the event.

It was McCartney who came up with the idea four years ago.

“By ours, I mean northern Maine,” he continued. “More than 500 people have placed their hands on some part of this [project].”

Other scale models are located in Boston, Peoria, Ill., and the country of Sweden. But none is as large, complete or accessible, said professor Bill Brewer of the University of Illinois.

Brewer has visited the other models. He said that what makes the Maine model unique is that it is outside and accessible year-round from one road.

The Maine model also cost nothing, thanks to donated time, land, materials and the labor of students at a dozen County schools.

“Washington [D.C.] could do with a big dose of Aroostook County cooperation,” Sen. Susan Collins, a County native, said Saturday, poking fun at the federal bureaucracy.

The project, she said, is an example of “the can-do spirit of Aroostook County.”

“We have a lot to celebrate,” she said. “The majesty of Aroostook County has been turned into a teaching tool.”

Built on a scale of one mile to 93 million miles, each of the planet replicas is built to scale and spaced along Route 1 at the appropriate distance from the sun.

The sun is portrayed in the model as a large yellow arch three floors high at the Northern Maine Museum of Science inside Folsom Hall at UMPI.

Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are located in Presque Isle, with Earth – about the size of a softball – exactly one mile from the arch near Percy’s Auto Sales.

At 61 inches in diameter, Jupiter is the largest of the model planets.

Painted with the swirling colors of its gases, it sits on a hill in Westfield, 5.28 miles south of UMPI, along with four of its moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Saturn, with its colorful rings and moon Titan, suddenly looms up on drivers from its pedestal in Westfield just a stone’s throw from the edge of a potato field.

Farther south, Uranus is in Bridgewater and Neptune is in Littleton.

Pluto, the smallest of the models at just 1 inch in diameter, is housed with its moon, Charon, at the tourist information center just off Interstate 95 in Houlton.

The Maine model officially became the largest in the world last Friday when Uranus was raised in front of the community center in Bridgewater.

“I feel great,” McCartney said with a sigh of relief as a crew from Maine Public Service Co. finished lowering the sky-blue, basketball-sized orb onto its concrete pedestal. “This is beautiful.

“At times we wondered if we would finish,” he said. “There were even times when we were ready to walk away.

“We stuck with it,” he said.

Among those speaking at Saturday’s dedication was U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Rex J. Walheim, who in April 2002 flew on the space shuttle Atlantis to deliver parts for the International Space Station.

“It’s quite a ride,” he said, comparing the spirit of cooperation between the United States and Russia on the space station with that exhibited in the construction of the solar system model.

“The solar system model is a window into what the space program will mean for the future,” he said. “It will inspire the next generation of leaders, some of whom may decide to become astronauts.”

The educational aspect of the project, McCartney said, is what has made it so important.

“This is not about a solar system model,” he said. “What this is really about is science education.”

The model, McCartney said, will be used as the basis for educational materials that will be developed and made available to teachers across the state.

“You could call this [dedication] the end of Phase I,” he said.