• Question: what planet has the closest eviroment (tempreture, land mass etc)

    Asked by eevee to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 21 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      I assume you mean closest to ours? Venus used to but not any more. If you’re thinking outside our solar system then I don’t know – I think they have found a few candidates for rocky planets but none of them are much like ours.

    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Mars is similar in that it hs an atmosphere, but it is much thinner than ours, and wouldn’t support our life – it is also pretty cold at night there with temperatures dropping well below zero degrees celsius. Venus is similar in mass…but it’s acidic atmosphere is very inhospitable – they’ve sent probes to Venus’ surface, but they haven’t lasted very long as they are quickly erroded and stop functioning within minutes!

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 20 Mar 2011:

      Venus is the closest in size but not in temperature. Mars is the closest in land I guess. None of them are great though, otherwise we’d easily be able to go and live on them!

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Well considering just the planets in our Solar System its probably Mars. Mars has seasons like Earth, it once had liquid water. It has weather and polar ice caps. There are lots of similarities. The day on Mars is similar in length to the Earth and the atmosphere isn’t completely alien to us – not that we can live there yet of course!

      Looking at exoplanets its hard to tell since we don’t know what their atmospheres are like – an that’s the biggest thing for deciding if it is ‘earthlike’.

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