Tour of the Solar System

This show is nice for younger children because there is more light. Useful: NASA Planetary Factsheet

Overview

Move from planet to planet asking kids what they see and adding facts as you go

Start: Earth

I either start at the Earth, perhaps zoomed in on our city or the building we are in.

Zoom out and as our rocket ship lifts off the ground. Soon we see the Earth as a sphere, and we see the Moon.

Q: Tell me how the Moon looks different than the Earth

Common replies:

• Earth is bigger -- moon is about a 1/4 the size of the earth -- if the earth were a pizza, the moon would be 2 slices.
• Earth has water and clouds -- the moon has no atmosphere and no oceans! It's a rock sitting in cold cold outer space.

Mercury

Zoom to the first planet -- the closest to the Sun. Q: Does Mercury remind you of any other world we've seen so far?

Common replies:

Silence. (Not sure how to rephrase this sometimes)

Moon. Mercury is a lot like the moon, no oceans, not atmosphere. It's bigger than the moon but not by much.

Other things to say:

• Mercury has a huge iron core, so that makes it more like the Earth.
• 1 year on mercury is 88 days. It rotates slower than it orbits. It takes mercury two years to make a full day!
• The day side can be 800 F (hotter than your oven can get) and the night side can be -300 F (no atmosphere to move heat around)

Venus

Q: What planet is next?

Venus has a very thick atmosphere. It's so thick when it rains on Venus, the rain doesn't even hit the ground. This is an image that cuts through all those clouds so we can see the surface (radar map). If you were near Venus, it would look whitish blue because of its highest clouds.

Q: What do you see?

Common replies:

Fire. Hot. Lava.

• The surface of Venus has a lot of lava! But it doesn't seem to have volcanos, just a roiling and boiling surface (over 800F!).
• Venus is almost the same size as the Earth, but it looks much different. Why do you think that is?
• Closer to the Sun?
• Slow rotation (it rotates backwards, and very very slowly, it takes 243 earth days to have one Venus day, and that's longer than a Venus year (225 days)

Scientists are still trying to piece together the answer to that question!

Earth

Q: What's next?

We've already talked about this one -- so as we go by, I'll just point out how weird it is that we have a moon, and such a huge moon. The only other object in our solar system that as a moon 1/4 of its size is Pluto. We almost have a double planet system!

Mars

Q: What's next?

Q: Does Mars remind you of any world we've seen so far?

Common replies: No, silence (trick question?), Earth? Mars is another unique place! It's about half the size of Earth.

What colors do you see (red, blue) the red is from Iron, you can think of Mars as as dry as the Sahara, colder than Antartica, and rusted over!

Look at Olympus Mons -- biggest mountain in the solar system. It even has craters! It's much bigger than Mount Everest (largest on Earth). It is a shield volcano (probably dead), like the Hawaiian Islands.

Look at Mariner Valley -- one of the largest canyons in our solar system. Its about as long as the United States, and 23,000 feet deep

Asteroid Belt

Q: What's next? Common replies: Jupiter

Turn on the asteroids, this makes them look a lot more dense then it really is. It's not like in the movies. If you stood on one asteroid, you probably couldn't see another (they are also typically the color of asphalt).

Jupiter

Q: What's next?

Q: What do you see on Jupiter that we haven't seen yet?

Common Replies:

• Something relating to bands, spots: Jupiter is huge! 300 times as massive as the Earth. And while the earth takes 24 hours to rotate, Jupter does it in less than 10 hours! Those bands are from that fast motion, which separates out different materials by their density. The spots are enormous hurricanes, the great red spot could fit 3 earths inside, and it was first seen by a human in the 1600s (Galileo).
• Something to do with Moons:
  Jupiter has more than 68 moons. We can see four:
• Io: So close to Jupiter and with an oval orbit, Jupiter pulls on Io differently as Io orbits. This makes Io stretch and compress up to 3 feet in a week's time. This friction causes lots of volcanic activity. So much so, scientists have observed ejected material orbiting along with Io.
• Europa: This moon excites scientists because it seems like it has a global salt water ocean below an icy surface. If there is life in our Solar System beyond Earth, Europa would be a great place to look
• Ganymede: Ganymede is very big! It's bigger than the Moon. It's bigger than Mercury. If it was orbiting the Sun (not Jupiter) it would be a planet.
• Callisto: Callisto looks similar to Ganymede, they are both not active (no volcanos or techtonic activity), like the Moon and Mercury (and Mars). However, like everything this side of the astroid belt, they are made of ices, not rocks.

You can also talk about the Trojan Asteroids here, but not for too long. Their orbits circularize in WWT pretty quickly.

Saturn

Q: What's Next?

Q: What's new with this planet?

Common Replies:

• Rings -- Saturn has amazing rings.
• They might look like they are solid but they are really made up of tiny rocks, the biggest being about the size of a house.
• The rings are bright because they are reflective, made of ices that reflect sunlight, think of being in the snow on a sunny day.
• The ring system is very flat, about a km wide. If the rings were shrunk down to the size of a football field, they would be thinner than a piece of paper.
• Spaces between the rings? -- Usually from Saturns moons's tides making some places very unstable to orbit.
• Bands? -- Saturn is not nearly as massive as Jupiter, but still is 75,000 miles across and rotates once every 11 hours. (Same idea as jupiter)
• Sadly, Titan imagery is not in WWT. Though we've landed on it!

Uranus, Neptune

Q: What planet is after Saturn? I lump these two together because we don't have a lot of information about them. They are blue because of methane, and they have ring systems too (so does Jupiter) but very hard to see.

Pluto

Q: Who thinks Pluto should be considered a planet? I still get question about Pluto being a planet. My take is:

1. Pluto is the same object no matter what you call it.
2. Ceres, the biggest asteroid in the astroid belt was called a planet until we found many many more asteroids. Pluto is a Kuiper belt object, like a second outer Asteroid belt. The problem was the same as before, if Pluto is a planet, we're going to have 100s of planets.
3. If there is more time, and people aren't satisfied I ask them to define a continent.
• Should Europe be a continent?
• Should Madagascar? (It is on its own tectonic plate)
4. Or they might be interested in the IAU definition of a dwarf planet.
• Round (so massive enough that it is shaped by it's gravity, sorry asteroids, comets, and Kuiper belt objects)
• Not orbiting a more massive world (no moons allowed)
• "cleared the path of its orbit" (Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's, sorry Pluto.)