1)    Named after Roman goddess of love

2)    it is the third brightest natural object in the sky after the Sun and Moon

3)    Venus is the planet in the solar system most similar to Earth (bit smaller about 95% the width of the Earth — and has 80% the Earth’s mass.)  (Earth’s sister planet)

4)    surface temperature is 460° Celsius— that’s 860° F, hot enough to melt lead. Even though Mercury is closer to the Sun, Venus is way hotter (runaway greenhouse effect)

5)    Its air is almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide, and atmospheric pressure on Venus is a crushing 92 times that of Earth’s

6)    it rains sulfuric acid, too, but it’s so hot the drops evaporate before hitting the ground.

7)    Sulfur dioxide is a popular molecule there, and clouds form from sulfuric acid.

8)    One day on Venus is about 243 Earth days.

9)    It rotates so slowly that at its equator, you could jog faster than the planet spins. This spin resulted in the absence of magnetic fields. Not only that, but the planet spins backwards! (retrograde motion).

10)  Venus has no moon

11)  Venus is the most spherical of all the planets. Because it rotates so slowly, it doesn’t bulge out at the equator from centrifugal force like Earth does.

12)  Under international agreement, surface features on Venus— mountains, plains, craters, and so on—are all named after women or goddesses of various cultures.

13)  Venus is the same size as Earth, but with a super thick atmosphere.

14) Tremendous volcanic activity ages ago resurfaced the entire planet, and it still may be active today.

15) Venus transits: the style in which the orbits of Venus and Earth align, they happen in pairs separated by eight years, but then don’t happen again for over a century.

16) The Soviet Union’s Venera 3 was the first man-made craft to land on Venus in 1966.

1)    The Red Planet

2)    It was once thought to be the god of war,

3)    It’s colder than us, too, with an average surface temperature of about 60 below 0 Celsius.

4)    only about half the size of Earth

5)     It’s red because it’s rusty. The dust is rich in iron that’s oxidized, forming rust. The dust coats a lot of the surface, giving it a butterscotch texture, and also gets blown into the atmosphere.

6)    It left behind a vast basin near the north pole of the planet, which filled with lava. Elevations in the north hemisphere are lower than the south, and can be depressed by several kilometers.

7)    Walking from the south to the north pole is  all downhill.

8)     Tharsis bulge, a huge plateau that’s home to the four biggest volcanoes on Mars, and the largest volcano in the solar system: Olympus Mons. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics today, but possibly it once did. Tharsis was probably over a hot spot, a plume of hotter material rising up through the planet’s mantle.

9)    Valles Marineris; a canyon discovered when the Mariner 9 probe orbited Mars in the 1970s. It is a gigantic crack in the surface of Mars 4000 kilometers long, 200 kilometers wide, and 7 kilometers deep. (10 times longer and 10 times wider than the Grand Canyon)

10)  Mars has a thin atmosphere. Pressure at the surface is less than 1% of Earth’s, and the air is mostly carbon dioxide.

11)  Mars has two moons named Deimos and Phobos. 

12)  Mars has frozen water at the poles and at the mid-latitudes 

13)  Pieces of Mars have been found on Earth.

14)  The largest dust storms in the solar system occur in Mars because of Mar's elliptical shaped orbital path around the Sun. These storms cover huge portion of the planet and can be long lasting.

15)  The orbit of Mars is the most eccentric of the eight planets. In other words among all the planets it has minimal circular orbital path.

16)  Mars was once very wet. There are of evidence for flowing water on the surface long ago, including dry river beds, dry lakes, and oceans