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The
Planets The Earth’s orbit
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The nine planets
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Far and near
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Big and small
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Hot and cold
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Moons
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Story: School trip to the Moon 15 Activities
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Bilingual Dictionary
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Original text by Jade Michaels
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The Earth’s orbit We live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. It has got air we can breathe. 71% of our planet is water. From space, the Earth looks like a blue ball. The Earth is 149 million kilometres away from the sun. It takes one year to go around the sun.
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Earth
orbit 1 year
The sun isn’t a planet. It is a star at the centre of the solar system. It formed 5 billion years ago from a cloud of gas and dust. The sun’s diameter is 1,392,000 kilometres. It is much bigger than the Earth.
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▼
▼
Sun
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Sun
Earth 3
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The nine planets
Pluto
(dwarf planet)
There are nine planets in the solar system. All nine planets go around the sun. The journey around the sun is called an orbit.
Uranus
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Jupiter
Venus
Mercury Mars
Sun Neptune Earth
Saturn
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Mercury’s orbit Some planets take a short time to go around the sun. Mercury orbits the sun the fastest. It only takes 88 days to go around the sun.
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Mercury
Sun
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▼ orbit 88 days
Pluto’s orbit Some planets take a long time to go around the sun. Pluto takes 247.7 years to go around the sun.
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Pluto
(dwarf planet)
Sun
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▼ orbit 6
247.7 years
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Mars Mars is a very exciting planet. It is called the Red Planet, because it has got lots of red rocks. The largest volcano in the solar system is on Mars. It is called Olympus Mons. It is 24 kilometres high and 500 kilometres wide at the base. It is bigger than Mount Everest. Billions of years ago there were rivers and lakes on Mars. There is no water on Mars today, but there are river valleys. The Mariner Valley is the biggest valley in the solar system. It is 6.4 kilometres deep and 241 kilometres wide.
Mariner 4 visited Mars in 1965. It was the first spacecraft on Mars. In 1976, there were two more expeditions in the spacecraft Viking. Scientists wanted to find aliens there! But they didn’t find life on Mars. On 3rd January 2004, a NASA robot landed on Mars. Now we have new photos of this amazing planet.
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Far and near Some planets are near the sun. These planets are Venus, Mars, Mercury and the Earth. Mercury is the nearest planet to the sun. Venus is the second planet from the sun. It is the brightest and hottest planet. We can sometimes see Venus from the Earth. Some planets are far away from the sun. These planets are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto (the dwarf planet). Pluto is 5,906 million kilometres away from the sun. It is the furthest planet from the sun. Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun. It is the second biggest planet. Saturn has got beautiful rings made of ice and rock.
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