Eight planets, one Sun
Our Sun has eight planets going around it. Starting from the Sun and heading out, here is what you would find — and how long a spacecraft would take to get there.
Mercury — Tiny, grey and covered in craters like the Moon. Baking hot on the sunny side, freezing on the dark side. A year here is just 88 days. Spacecraft trip: about 7 years, because you have to slow down a lot to get caught by such a small planet.
Venus — Almost the same size as Earth, but wrapped in thick clouds of acid, with air so heavy it would crush a submarine. The hottest planet of all — hotter than an oven. Trip: about 4 months.
Earth — Home. The only place we know with oceans, air you can breathe, and living things. Look after it.
Mars — The red planet. Rusty deserts, the tallest volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons, three times as high as Everest), and ice at the poles. Robot rovers are driving around on it right now. Trip: 7 to 9 months, and you can only leave every 26 months when Earth and Mars line up.
Jupiter — The giant. Over 1,300 Earths would fit inside it. It has a storm called the Great Red Spot that is bigger than our whole planet and has been blowing for hundreds of years. It has more than 90 moons. Trip: about 5 years.
Saturn — The one with the rings. The rings are made of billions of pieces of ice, from dust-sized to house-sized. Saturn is so light for its size it would float in a bathtub — if you could find one big enough. Trip: about 7 years.
Uranus — A blue-green ice giant that spins on its side, like a rolling ball instead of a spinning top. Trip: 9 years or more.
Neptune — The farthest planet, deep blue, with the fastest winds anywhere: over 2,000 km/h. Only one spacecraft has ever visited — Voyager 2, in 1989. Trip: 12 years.
Beyond Neptune are the dwarf planets, like Pluto, and then the Kuiper Belt — a ring of icy leftovers from when the planets were made.
How much would you weigh?
Bigger planets pull harder. On Jupiter you would weigh more than twice as much as on Earth — you could barely stand up. On the Moon you would weigh only one-sixth as much, which is why the Apollo astronauts bounced around like kangaroos. Type your weight in and see.