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: Planets

: Planets
National Aeronautics andSpace Administration Solar System ExplorationNASA Science Filters Map Selector: Planets ShareEmailPrint Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Hypothetical 'Planet X' Small Bodies Dwarf Planets Pluto Ceres Asteroids Comets Meteors & Meteorites Moons Earth's Moon Europa Enceladus Titan More Moons Regions Our Solar System Kuiper Belt Oort Cloud Beyond Our Solar System Stars Sun AddToAny

Earth-Titan-Moon size comparison.PNG If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system Mercury Venus Earth You Are Here Moon Mars Jupiter Io Europa Ganymede Callisto Saturn Titan Uranus Neptune Pluto(we still love you) That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now. Pretty empty out here. Here comes our first planet... As it turns out, things are pretty far apart. We’ll be coming up on a new planet soon. Most of space is just space. Halfway home. Destination: Mars! It would take about seven months to travel this distance in a spaceship. Sit back and relax. When are we gonna be there? Seriously. This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up. I spy, with my little eye... something black. If you were on a road trip, driving at 75mi/hr, it would have taken you over 500 years to get here from earth. All these distances are just averages, mind you. If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets. Pretty close to Jupiter now. Sorry. Lots of time to think out here... Pop the champagne! We're always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers.

Planets For Kids - Solar System Facts and Astronomy Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars + Larger view The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Big History Project: The Universe Pan Gu and the Egg of the World According to Chinese mythology, in the beginning a huge egg contained chaos. The giant Pan Gu emerged from the egg and gave order to that Chaos. As he grew to 48,000 kilometers high, his skull separated the sky while his feet remained planted on the Earth. When he died, his eyes became the Sun and the Moon, his breath the wind, his voice thunder, his limbs mountains, and his blood the roaring water. Titans and Gods of Olympus From Chaos emerged Gaia and Uranus who gave birth to the Titans. The Great Turtle's Island The Iroquois believed all the world was water. Genesis In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the heavens and Earth, sky and water, land masses, seed-bearing trees, and living creatures. Popul Vuh In Maya origin stories, the makers in the water, the Plumed Serpent, and the makers in the sky, the Heart of the Sky, created Earth and the animals. Modern Scientific Suddenly, 13.8 billion years ago, all the energy in the Universe burst.

note Cosmic Distance Scales - The Solar System About the Image One way to help visualize the relative distances in the solar system is to imagine a model in which the solar system is reduced in size by a factor of a billion (109). The Earth is then about 1.3 cm in diameter (the size of a grape). The Moon orbits about a foot away. The Sun is 1.5 meters in diameter (about the height of a man) and 150 meters (about a city block) from the Earth. Jupiter is 15 cm in diameter (the size of a large grapefruit) and 5 blocks away from the Sun. Distance Information Distances in the solar system are commonly measured in Astronomical Units (AU). The Moon, the closest solar system body to us, is about 400,000 km away from the Earth, which means it takes about 2 seconds for radio signal from Earth to reach the Moon and travel back. The most distant planet from the Earth isn't Pluto anymore. The Outer Reaches of the Solar System There are objects belonging to our Solar System that are even farther than the orbit of our planets. Parallax Radar

Albedo

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