Harvey's Space Adventure: Venus

Click and drag to rotate the planet!

Source: NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD)

Harvey loves NASA so far! He's learning so much about our solar system!

The next planet is Earth's neighbor, Venus! It is the second planet from the sun and the closest planet to us here on Earth. It's very bright when it's visible in the night sky!

Here are some cool things to know about Venus:

Venus is sometimes called Earth's twin because it's similar in size and structure. But it's also very different! People couldn't live on Venus because it's too hot, and it would be impossible for us to breathe in its atmosphere.

Mercury may be the closest planet to the sun, but Venus is still hotter! It's the hottest planet in our solar system, with a surface temperature of 900°F. That's hot enough to melt lead! It's extra hot because the atmosphere is so thick it traps all the heat.

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus! That's crazy! But it's because Venus rotates very slowly on its axis. It takes 243 Earth days for Venus to make a complete rotation, or one Venus day. But Venus orbits the sun faster than Earth does. It only takes 225 Earth days for Venus to complete its orbit, making one Venus year.

Venus has a solid surface with a lot of mountains and volcanoes.

Thick, stinky clouds always cover Venus. They are made of sulfuric acid and smell like rotten eggs!

No one has ever visited Venus, but some spacecraft have! It's so hot that anything that lands there burns up right away.

Another weird thing about Venus is that it rotates backward on its axis compared to the other planets. That means the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, the exact opposite of what happens here on Earth.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay