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Three beautiful planets - Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - are all visible to the unaided eye. If you have binoculars or a telescope, you can also see some of the moons and other features. Here's a beginner's look at the planets which lie beyond Earth.

Absolute Beginners - See Mars and beyond

This is a new version of an old article, which has been edited and updated.

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King of the Roman gods. Comet-killer. Two and a half times the mass of all the other planets put together. Shortest day of any planet in the Solar System. It's Jupiter! Find out more.

Jupiter - Facts for Kids

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Jupiter has at least 79 moons. Some of them are only half a mile long, but one is bigger than the planet Mercury. Which moon has hundreds of volcanoes, and which one has a deep ocean under an icy surface? Find out here.

Jupiter's Moons – Facts for Kids

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Saturday is Saturn's day. Saturn, a god of ancient mythology, is the planet with the beautiful rings. For 13 years, the Cassini space mission studied Saturn, its rings and moons.

Saturn Facts for Kids

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Everybody recognizes Saturn's rings, but that isn't all that circles the planet. There are shepherd moons, a moon with cold volcanoes erupting, a planet-sized moon, and more. And it took nearly two hundred years for the first seven known moons to get named.

Saturn's Moons – Facts for Kids

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Even being the Saturn's second biggest moon doesn't make Rhea very big. We could set three Rheas down on the USA and have room to spare. It whizzes around Saturn so quickly that a month is only four and a half Earth days long. It's so cold there that ice is as hard as rock.

Saturn's Moon Rhea - Facts for Kids

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Saturn's moon Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury. It's also the only moon with a thick atmosphere. In fact the atmosphere is so smoggy, we can't see the surface. How is Titan like Earth?

Titan - Facts for Kids

Other articles about Saturn's moons:

Mimas is named for a giant in Greek mythology, but Saturn's moon is no giant. It's less than 400 km (245 mi) across and the smallest body we know of that's rounded by gravity. The moon also has a bizarre resemblance to the Death Star in George Lukas's Star Wars films.

Mimas – Death Moon of Saturn


Saturn has lots of moons - 92 known ones. They are remarkable in many ways, but perhaps the strangest one is the misshapen and unpredictable Hyperion.

Hyperion – Saturn's Weird Wobbly Moon


Titan was a mystery for three and a half centuries. It's a giant moon shrouded in impenetrable clouds, and has only recently begun to share its secrets. Why do scientists say it's like Earth? Is it time to book a vacation to visit the lakes and mountains of Titan?

Titan - Planet-sized Moon of Saturn


Rhea was Saturn's wife in classical mythology. Rhea the moon zips around Saturn in four and a half days. Although it has an oxygen atmosphere, we won't be moving there anytime soon. Even in direct sunlight, it's -281 degrees Fahrenheit and the "atmosphere" is similar to a vacuum on Earth.

Rhea - Moon of Saturn

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This ice giant is twenty times farther from the Sun than we are. It circles the Sun lying on its side, so each half the planet is dark for over twenty years at a time. It's the planet Uranus, discovered in 1781 by William Herschel who named it George.

Uranus - Facts for Kids

William Herschel discovered the planet which was named Uranus after the ancient Greek sky god. Although Uranus has at least 27 moons, most of them weren't discovered until at least the twentieth century.

Moons of Uranus - Facts for Kids