The surface of Venus is a thick crust of dried up volcano lava. About 2/3 of the surface is low, rolling mountains and the rest is high flat places and low areas. Venus used to have tons of volcanoes! Imagine the hottest dessert you can think of... Venus is way worse!

Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide (this is what we breathe out) and the rest is mostly nitrogen. There is a very thick layer of poisonous clouds covering the entire planet. These clouds are made up of sulfuric acid droplets. (The clouds on earth are made up of water droplets.)

We think that Venus has an iron core just like the earth.

 

Venus is a lot like earth... It's about the same size. It's about the same mass. The surface rocks are about like ours. Compared to the other planets, it's got a distance from the Sun that is the closest to the earth.

But there are some major differences! There's hardly any water, the air is poisonous, the clouds are full of acid, the atmosphere is so thick and heavy that you'd be crushed by the pressure and, if that isn't enough for you, Venus is way way way too hot! Other than the Sun, Venus is the hottest place in our solar system. Even hotter than Mercury!

Why is Venus so hot? It's because of the thick layer of clouds... When heat goes in, it stays in! We call this the greenhouse effect. Have you ever made a little greenhouse out of some plastic wrap and put some plants inside? It gets really warm and moist inside the greenhouse -- this is great for many plants.

There's one last unpleasant thing about Venus: wind! In the upper atmosphere, the wind gets up to 350 km/h. That's 217 mph! On earth, when winds get up to 74 mph, we call it a hurricane!

 

Enter your weight here: pounds

and hit this button:

Your weight on Venus would be: pounds

 

To escape Venus' gravity and get out into space, a rocket would have to travel at a speed of 23,223 mph or 10.4 km/sec. That's about 354 times faster than your parents are allowed to drive on a U.S. highway! This is about as fast as it would take to get off the Earth. If we ever went to Venus, we'd definitely be able to get back home.

 

Except for our moon, Venus is the brightest object in our night sky. If you know just where to look, you can even see it in the daytime. The reason Venus is so bright is that the Sun reflects off all those clouds.

One of the coolest things about Venus is that it rotates in the opposite direction of most of the other planets! If we look down on the planets from above we see that Venus rotates clockwise (the way a clock's hand move around the clock) and all the other planets (except Uranus and Pluto) and all the moons spin counterclockwise (like if the clock's hands were moving backwards). Check out this picture:

Just like Mercury, Venus doesn't have any moons... and it's for the same reason as with Mercury: Venus is so close to the Sun that the Sun would steal all the moons away!

Finally, remember how we said that planets were like big magnets? Well, Venus might not be. We're pretty sure that this is because Venus rotates too slowly to become magnetic. Go back up and see how long a day on Venus is... Now, that's slow!

 

Sources:
In Quest of the Universe, 2nd ed. by Karl F. Kuhn
Voyages Through the Universe, 2nd ed. by Fraknoi, Morrison and Wolff
Universe by Kaufmann
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Astronomy by Christopher De Pree and Alan Axelrod
The Astronomy Cafe by Sten Odenwald