Tavish Armstrong

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Planets!

Tue 14 Dec 2010 01:02:00

Three things you should know about the planets in our solar system:

  1. Venus is the only planet whose north pole points in the direction of Earth’s south pole. That means it rotates opposite to its revolution around the sun. It does so very slowly – its day is 243 times as long as ours.
  2. Uranus is tilted almost horizontally – meaning that it is doing a barrel roll in the direction of its orbit. (Its north pole is still tilted slightly “upward”.)
  3. A long time ago, Mercury was hit so hard that one side of it has a dent in it and the other side is a crumpled mess. The crumpled area is referred to as Weird Terrain because it looks weird.

And that’s just the planets. Did you know that there’s an asteroid called Ida that has a moon?