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Mars is one of the easiest planets to spot in the night sky – it looks like a bright red point of light. Despite being inhospitable to humans, robotic explorers – like NASA's new Perseverance rover – are serving as pathfinders to eventually get humans to the surface of the Red Planet.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun – a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. Mars is also a dynamic planet with seasons, polar ice caps, canyons, extinct volcanoes, and evidence that it was even more active in the past.
Sep 3, 2024 · Planet Compare. NASA’s real-time science encyclopedia of deep space exploration. Our scientists and far-ranging robots explore the wild frontiers of our solar system.
Our solar system consists of our star, the Sun, and everything bound to it by gravity – the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune; dwarf planets such as Pluto; dozens of moons; and millions of asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.
Phobos, gouged and nearly shattered by a giant impact crater and beaten by thousands of meteorite impacts, is on a collision course with Mars. Phobos is the larger of Mars' two moons and is 17 x 14 x 11 miles (27 by 22 by 18 kilometers) in diameter.
The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away.
The ancient Romans could easily see seven bright objects in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, and the five brightest planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).
The composition of Jupiter is similar to that of the Sun – mostly hydrogen and helium. Deep in the atmosphere, pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid. This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system – an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water.
Feb 9, 2018 · NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has begun extra stargazing to help the space agency accomplish advances in Mars exploration over the next decade. The spacecraft already has worked more than double its planned mission life since launch in 2005.
May 18, 2020 · Distances between the planets, and especially between the stars, can become so big when expressed in miles and kilometers that they're unwieldy. So for cosmic distances, we switch to whole other types of units: astronomical units, light years and parsecs.
