Wandering Stars: a tour of the planets

A beauteous rip through the solar sytem, based on NASA's Science on a Sphere program "The Wanderers." In ancient times, humans watched the skies looking for clues to their future and to aid in their very survival. They soon observed that some stars were not fixed, but moved in the sky from night to night. They called these stars the wanderers. At the center of our solar system is the sun, binding the planets with its gravitational pull. From our viewpoint on earth, the sun appears small in the sky, but in reality it dwarfs even Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. The distance from the sun to the small worlds traveling it are vast. Light takes eight minutes to reach earth, and nearly a day to reach the farthest known bodies. Join us now as we tour our solar system, starting with sun-baked mercury and traveling to the remotest outskirts, where small, icy bodies move with only the faintest connection to our sun. Mercury Mercury, the closest planet to Sun is also the smallest terrestrial planet. It orbits so swiftly that its year lasts only 88 Earth days. The airless cratered surface could almost be mistaken for our moon, relentlessly bombarded by meteoroids for four and a half billion years. One of these encounters left a giant scar called the golarus basin, one of the largest impact sights in the solar system. Temperatures on the surface of mercury can reach a blistering 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and can dip to 300 degrees below zero on the night side. VenusVenus, as seen from Earth, is the brightest object in sky after the Sun and Moon. Russian probes were the first to land on Venus in the 1970's and 1980's. Venus's surface is volcanic. Its atmosphere is composed of thick, dense carbon dioxide with sulfuric acid clouds. Both are potent greenhouse gases that trap incoming sunlight. Venus rotates slowly—one Venusian day lasts almost four Earth months.EarthEarth is the only planet with life as we know it. The atmosphere and temperatures are