JUPITER

 

Jupiter is so far away from the sun, and its orbit is so big, that it takes about 12 Earth years for it to travel around the sun, just once!

In 1977, we sent two spaceships to explore Jupiter. They traveled very fast and studied it for one and a half years. It took one and a half years to reach Jupiter.

Jupiter is the "giant" in our solar system. If Jupiter was hollow (empty on the inside), you could fit more than 1,300 Earths inside it.
No one has ever seen the surface of Jupiter, because it is covered with clouds which are hundreds of miles thick. The bands of color you see in a photo of Jupiter are the tops of the clouds.

Our Earth spins around once every 24 hours. Jupiter takes only 11 hours to spin around once - the fastest of any planet. There is a very large red spot on Jupiter. It is twice the size of Earth, and is probably a huge storm or hurricane.

The surface of Jupiter is an ocean of liquid hydrogen. The center of Jupiter is extremely hot - more than 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. You would weigh almost 3 times as much on Jupiter as you do on Earth. (A 100-pound person on Earth would weigh 264 pounds on Jupiter.)

Jupiter has at least 16 moons of all shapes and sizes. One moon, called Io, even has active volcanoes on it! Voyager I found that Jupiter has a very thin ring of dust particles around it (similar to the ring around Saturn, but much thinner).

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