Welcome to Venus!
You have reached stop #3 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 Science Solar System Exploration
the hottest planet
Even though Venus is not the closest planet to the Sun, it is the hottest! Its dense atmosphere acts as a greenhouse and heats the surface to above the melting point of lead, about 880 degrees Fahrenheit. If you remember from visiting Mercury, Mercury gets close at 800 degrees Fahrenheit but it also gets down to -290 degrees Fahrenheit on the side facing away from the Sun. Venus’s other neighbor, Earth, has an average temperature of 61 degrees Fahrenheit. All the other planets are in the negative temperatures, starting from Mars at -20 degrees Fahrenheit all the way out to Neptune at -331 degrees Fahrenheit. Aren’t you glad to be on Earth?
A couple other interesting things about Venus is that it spins the other way (so the sun rises in the west and sets in the east) and VERY slowly. In fact, on Venus, a day (243 Earth days) is LONGER than a year (225 Earth days)!
More kid-friendly facts about Venus can be found at the NASA Science Space Place.
More in-depth information about Venus can be found at NASA Science Solar System Exploration.