The Solar System

Mercury * Since it is closer to the Sun than the Earth, the illumination of Mercury's disk varies when viewed with a telescope from our perspective. Galileo's telescope was too small to see Mercury's phases but he did see the phases of Venus. * It can only be seen in morning or evening twilight.

Venus  There are no small craters on Venus. It seems that small meteoroids burn up in Venus' dense atmosphere before reaching the surface. Craters on Venus seem to come in bunches indicating that large meteoroids that do reach the surface usually break up in the atmosphere.  Venus is the goddess of love and beauty.  Venus consists mostly of carbon dioxide  Venus is one of the four solar terrestrial planets, meaning that, like the Earth, it is a rocky body.  Much of Venus's surface appears to have been shaped by volcanic activity. Overall, Venus has several times as many volcanoes as Earth. The only volcanic complex of this size on Earth is the Big Island of Hawaii.

The Planet Earth  Earth is made up of complex, interactive systems that are often unpredictable. Air, water, land, and life - including humans - combine forces to create a constantly changing world that we are striving to understand.  Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the fifth largest in the solar system.

Relative Size of Planets PlanetScale Object MercuryMarble VenusWalnut EarthGolf ball MarsAcorn JupiterBasketball SaturnSoccer ball UranusSoftball NeptuneSmall grapefruit PlutoKidney bean

Radii of the Planets

We live on the Planet Earth!

Here We Are…..  Earth is the 3rd planet from the Sun at a distance of about 150 million kilometers (93.2 million miles). It takes days for the Earth to travel around the Sun and hours for the Earth rotate a complete revolution. It has a diameter of 12,756 kilometers (7,973 miles), only a few hundred kilometers larger than that of Venus.

The Solar System 

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