NASA announced today that the Curiosity Rover made a successful landing on Mars! This landing was the first of it’s kind for NASA. It combined a heat shield, a parachute and a rocket crane designed to hover over the landing site and lower the rover by cable to the Martian surface. Talk about some crazy great engineering!
Have you ever wondered just how big is the planet Mars? Well, wonder no more! Mars has a diameter of 6,792 km or 4,221 miles. The diameter of Mars is about 1/2 that of Earth’s diameter.
Planet Earth is the third planet closes to the sun. Using the old saying, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas,” it can be remembered that the order of the planets goes like this: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (if you consider it to be a planet). Accordingly, it would seem as though either Venus or Mars would be the closes planet to Earth. But which is it?
Here are 8 awesome pictures of the surface of planet Mars to give you a better idea of what Mars looks like up close.
Since the last post focused on the Planet Mars, I thought it would be worth highlighting the two tiny moons that light up the Martian night sky. The names of the moons of Mars are Phobos and Deimos.