For information on one of the planets please click on one of the links below

Venus.

Venus is the brightest of all the "stars" in the sky. It is the third brightest object after the Sun and Moon. It's named after the goddess of love. It's always covered with thick cloud, so we can't see its surface.

Even though Earth and Venus are almost the same size, Venus has much more atmosphere or gas. The pressure at ground level is nearly 100 times the pressure at sea level on Earth. The atmosphere is about 97% carbon dioxide and about 3% nitrogen. In fact there's roughly as much nitrogen on Earth (where it makes up 80% of our atmosphere) as there is on Venus.

On Venus, the clouds cover 100% of the planet all of the time. The clouds begin at 50 km above the surface, and then continue for another 25 km above that. The clouds are made of droplets of sulphuric acid, which are about 50 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. Venus takes 225 earth-days to make a complete loop around the Sun. We don't yet know why, but Venus rotates in an opposite direction to all the other planets in the Solar System (except Uranus). In fact, it rotates very slowly, and a Venus Day lasts 243 Earth Days. So on Venus a day is longer than a year.

Every 584 days, Venus and Earth come to their point of closest approach. And every time this happens, Venus shows Earth the same face. Is there some force that makes Venus align itself with the Earth rather than the Sun, or is this just a coincidence?

The temperature on the surface of Venus is about 480oC - hot enough to melt the zinc off your tin roof. But this enormous temperature is not just because Venus is closer to the Sun than we are. In fact, about two thirds of the energy of the Sun is absorbed by the clouds, and only one third of the heat energy reaches the ground. In fact less solar energy reaches the ground on Venus than on Earth. The reason that Venus is so hot is because of a massive runaway Greenhouse effect. Any heat that does get inside the clouds is trapped there.

This is definitely not the most hospitable place to visit