Welcome to Jupiter!
You have reached stop #6 on Plymouth PTA’s Mission: Planet Exploration, a driving tour of the solar system designed to scale based on a 6-foot sun at Plymouth Elementary School! Click on Mission: Planet Exploration for more info, including a map to all 8 planets.
Image Credit: NASA
The Largest Planet
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. In fact, Jupiter’s mass is more than 2 times that of all the other planets combined! Jupiter is called a gas giant because it’s really big and made of mostly gases like hydrogen and helium. In this way, it is similar to a star but Jupiter just never got big enough to start burning.
That big ball we see does not have a hard surface like we do on Earth. There would be no place to land a spacecraft, but you wouldn’t want to fly through Jupiter anyway because there’s so much pressure and heat inside those swirling clouds that any spacecraft would likely be crushed, melted, …vaporized!
Jupiter's atmosphere is what gives it its signature look. The stripes and swirls are actually cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. That Great Red Spot is a giant storm almost twice as big as our Earth!
Even though Jupiter’s the biggest planet, it spins the fastest, making a full rotation every 10 hours.
More kid-friendly facts about Mercury can be found at the NASA Science Space Place.
More in-depth information about Mercury can be found at NASA Science Solar System Exploration.