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four planets

Our Sun is a little unusual because it doesn’t have any friends. It’s just one Sun surrounded by planets, asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets. But solar systems can have more than one sun.

The Inner Planets All are solid, dense, and rocky. None of the inner planets has rings. Compared to the outer planets, the inner planets are small. They have shorter orbits around the Sun and they spin more slowly.

The gas giants of our solar system are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These four large planets, also called jovian planets after Jupiter, reside in the outer part of the solar system past the orbits of Mars and the asteroid belt.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune do not have any solid surfaces and therefore one could never land on them (assuming one had the technology to withstand the high pressures and temperatures deep inside them). Mars is the obvious targets. After that no more planets, just moons and planetoids.

To this day, setting foot on Mars remains to be one of mankind’s greatest ambitions. However, landing on the red planet is not easy. In fact, it’s the most difficult planet in our solar system to land on with a success rate of just 40%; lower than on the Moon, Venus, and even Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Why Mars is the hardest planet to land on in our solar system

• NASA’s InSight probe is scheduled to touch down on Mars today, but it’s easier said than done – only 40% of Mars landings have been successful.
• Mars’ atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s making it extremely difficult to land on Mars.

Venus is named for the ancient Roman goddess of love and beauty, who was known as Aphrodite to the Ancient Greeks.

On March 1, 1966 the Venera 3 Soviet space probe crash-landed on Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet. Its sister craft Venera 2 had failed due to overheating shortly before completing its flyby mission.

To date, no definitive proof has been found of past or present life on Venus. With extreme surface temperatures reaching nearly 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F) and an atmospheric pressure 90 times that of Earth, the conditions on Venus make water-based life as we know it unlikely on the surface of the planet.

Air on Venus The atmosphere of Venus is very hot and thick. You would not survive a visit to the surface of the planet – you couldn’t breathe the air, you would be crushed by the enormous weight of the atmosphere, and you would burn up in surface temperatures high enough to melt lead.

At least, you wouldn’t be able to live on Saturn like you’d live on Earth, or perhaps even Mars. Saturn is what we call a “gas giant.” It is a planet made up most of hydrogen and helium. This means that there is no solid surface on Saturn, Well, that we know of, anyway. Saturn doesn’t have any of that.

Second, like the rest of the planet, the atmosphere on Saturn consists of roughly 75% hydrogen and 25% helium, which means there is little to no oxygen…which means there will be little to no breathing.

Saturn. This is another space giant that will allow you to stay on it for less than one second.

The only planets whose atmospheres have been studied are the ones in our solar system. Mars’ atmosphere is more like the Earth’s than any other planet’s, but a human being could definitely not breathe it. In the last few years, astronomers have discovered a number of planets orbiting other stars, very far away.

Because the atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen — ordinary breathable air — would float. The air that’s holding you up is also the air that you can breathe.