Venus

Planet Venus is the 2nd planet from the Sun. Even though it’s that close, it’s 107 MILLION kilometers from the Sun. That’s long enough to wrap around the Earth’s equator three or four times. Venus has no moons. Its atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s, and contains the gases carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Ah, nothing like waking up to toxic fumes each morning. It takes Venus almost 225 Earth days just to orbit the Sun, and 18 days longer just to spin in a circle. Nobody knows who discovered Venus or even when. It’s always been near the Sun though, and can be visible in the sky during the day. Venus is named after the Greek goddess of love, also known as Aphrodite. Venus’s symbol is the same symbol that represents girls. Venus is known as Earth’s sister planet. Venus’s mass is 81% of Earth’s. Its diameter is 12,107 kilometers. Its average temperature is 449 ° Celsius. Venus’s average density is 5.25 g/cm². Its escape velocity is 37,498 km/h. There are 3 layers in Venus, the crust, the mantle, and the core-sort of like Earth, minus the 2 separate cores. There have been 4 probes/satellites to have explored Venus so far. They are the Mariner 2 in 1962, the NASA Pioneer Venus (1978), The Soviet Venera 15 and 16 missions (1983-1984), and the orbiting NASA Magellan radar-mapping mission (1990-1994). The results of these missions were discovering the surface of Venus. There are some really interesting facts about Venus, too. If you weighed 110 pounds on Earth, you’d only weigh 99.7 on Venus. A person weighing 170 would weigh 154.1. My birthday on Earth is June 13th, but on Venus, my next one would be on March 18th, 2010. (You can find your’s out at [].) If you were to build a scale model of the solar system, and the Sun is 615 millimeters, Venus would be only **5.3 MILLIMETERS.** If you think about it, that’s not very big.







Gliffy concept map address: http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1971875/

Bibilography: [], [], [], [], [|http://www.exploratoriumedu/ronh/age/index.html], []