Mars

planets · red planet · desert world · space exploration

The Red Planet. Mars looks orange-red because of rusty dust covering its rocky surface. This rusty color is why people call it the Red Planet.

Freezing and dry. Mars is incredibly cold, with temperatures dropping to minus 153 degrees Celsius (colder than Antarctica). It's also a desert with almost no liquid water on the surface, though ice hides underground and in polar ice caps.

Barely-there air. Mars has an atmosphere, but it's so thin you couldn't breathe it. It's mostly carbon dioxide and the air pressure is only a tiny fraction of what we experience on Earth.

About half Earth's size. Mars is smaller than Earth but bigger than the Moon, with a diameter of about 6,779 kilometers. Its entire dry-land surface area is roughly the same size as all of Earth's dry land combined.

Lower gravity. If you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you'd only weigh about 38 pounds on Mars because its gravity is roughly one-third of Earth's pull.