Part 2:Half a Cup of Coffee and a Continuation of the Tour around the Solar System

After flying around the solar system in my bubble I have landed on Mars and am very close to Olympus Mons.

Olympus Mons is about 90,000 feet above the surface of Mars. This is about three times the height of Everest. It is about 480 km across at its base and at its top is a massive caldera full of nested craters about 80 km across and 3 km deep.

Everything is hard to take in because as I climb out of the bubble and look up at where I think the top is, it is absolutely massive, the top of Olympus Mons is actually over the horizon. Our puny brains have trouble taking in this sort of scale I remind myself. I think again and climb back into the bubble. Wimping out I set up a program and strap myself into my seat and decide to go for a tour round Olympus Mons in my warm and safe reliable spaceship bubble.

Olympus Mons from above

I took some pictures on the way up but the best ones are of the scarp and the one from above as I pull away. I leave Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos, and head for Jupiter. It is wise to be careful on the way to Jupiter because of the asteroid belt so I reduce speed from 0.9 lightspeed to 0.8 lightspeed and pull out the latest astronomy magazine (what you can’t see can’t hurt you).

Asteroids are Rocky metallic objects all sizes that are just too small to be called planets. Tens of thousands of these exist between Jupiter and Mars in a massive doughnut shaped ring even Homer would be proud of if it were made of dough. Sometimes these asteroids pass close to Earth and are then called a near Earth objects (NEO’s for short).

As I approach the largest planet in the solar system it starts filling the screen from way out. Jupiter is 10 times the radius of Earth and 300 times the mass but this only makes it a quarter of the density of Earth. It has almost the same rotation of the Earth at 9.9 hours although the rotation is different at the polls compared to the equator. This has a remarkable effect of producing high winds at the equator.

Jupiter

The Large red spot is very noticeable rotating anticlockwise and having been there for about 200 years which isn’t really that long when you look at the universe’s timescale. Unfortunately landing wouldn’t be such a good idea as there may not be a solid core but it is supposed that a solid core may exist due to the very high pressure at the centre. This solid core can be made out of ice-Rock which would be about the size of Earth. Even getting to the centre would be hard because as the pressure and temperature increases about a third of the way down the hydrogen becomes metallic and electrically conducting. Further away from the centre the pressure and temperature would compress the hydrogen gas into a liquid.

Jupiter is certainly a lovely planet to look at even if it is not very hospitable. Jupiter has a total moon count of 50 officially named moons (23 new moons were discovered in 2003 alone) which have all sorts of atmospheres and make-ups. Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system its volcanoes spewing out lava due to the effect Jupiter has on its orbit which produces tidal heating. Europa is a moon that deserves some attention due to its potential underneath a 100 km ice surface to harbour life.

Saturn comes up next and is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium just like Jupiter. This paints an even better picture than Jupiter due to its ring system which makes it very memorable. Saturn is about 15% smaller than Jupiter and very similar. The big difference is the ring system which is thought to be made up of a planet that disintegrated when it had a collision nearby or with Saturn. It is a very thin ring and has gaps in the ring due to the different gravity effects on the particles. It is not a well-known fact but the other giant planets have ring systems as well but they are not quite as distinct.

saturn

At least 30 satellites are in orbit around Saturn. Titan is the largest satellite and it is a little under half the size of Earth. It has a nitrogen atmosphere of about 82 to 99% blue traces of ammonia, argon and ethane. It is expected that due to its atmosphere there could be lakes of methane and ethane. Another place to look for life.

Having run out of coffee and food I decide to carry on to Uranus. Uranus is about 15 times the mass of Earth. People used to give Uranus the cold shoulder but it’s one of the brighter worlds with some of the brightest clouds in the outer solar system and has 11 rings. It is bluish and a nice settling planet to look at. I start to drift away into sleep but immediately get slapped in the face by the face slapper and I wake up fully and almost fall out of my seat nearly knocking the self-destruct button. Not such a well-designed bubble!

Uranus

A swift jump to Neptune (for a lightspeed ship anyway) and I’m staring at the eighth planet away from the sun. Neptune orbits the sun in every 165 years and it’s the furthest planet from the Sun for a period of 20 years out of every 248 Earth years. The atmosphere gives an electric blue look but a great dark spot that was seen a few years ago has disappeared. Spots and like Jupiter don’t last that long. Neptune has at least eight satellites.

Neptune

Pluto which is and isn’t a planet appears next. It has been classified as a dwarf planet as it is almost a moon size. Charon was discovered recently and acts as a twin planet in synchronisation with Pluto. There’s not much out here and if I go further there will be the Kuiper Belt which is full of objects such as asteroids. Beyond that is the Oort cloud, a region full of comets. At its most distant Pluto is 4.5 3,000,000,000 miles from Earth

real shot of Pluto from Earth

This makes me feel a little bit lonely. I press the button and off I go to Earth, in a flash the big blue Marble appears and I touch down next to my neighbour’s pile of rubble, luckily he’s not in!