A Traveler's Guide to the Planets

Take a trip to the planetary pin-up boy Saturn, and get a ringside seat to the greatest spectacle in the solar system, and a close encounter with two extraordinary moons. Tiny Enceladus is making all the headlines as the must-see moon these days. It’s the little moon that has it all. Enormous icy geysers shooting into space from the south pole point to a warm salty ocean beneath the surface and, perhaps, a real possibility of life. Even more earth-like and yet far more alien is Titan, with a thick atmosphere and weather. Bulk up for the cold and fly a hot air balloon in Titanian skies, trek across vast icy dune fields, or row across a Titanian lake. Just don’t get caught in the rain: it’s liquid gasoline out here, not water, and it’ll freeze you as hard as rock.

Have you ever thought of blasting off to the King of the Planets? For a truly out-of-this-world planetary experience, you should head beyond the Asteroid Belt to the largest planet in the solar system. Welcome to Jupiter, a world so roomy that it could swallow every planet and moon in the solar system and still have room for more. Yet for all its bulk there is nowhere to land, just an infernal drop into a bottomless sky. If you like solid ground beneath your feet, there’s plenty of that as well. Encircled by some 63 moons, Jupiter is like a miniature solar system all of its own. The four biggest moons offer off-world travel opportunities to die for. Torn apart by eruptions and bathed in intense radiation, Io is the most volcanic place in the Solar System, at once incredibly beautiful and astoundingly dangerous. But it is tiny, frozen neighbor Europa that everyone is trying to reach. Hidden beneath its icy crust is a vast alien ocean, warmed from within, and offering one of the best chances for an encounter with life that we have found beyond Earth.

Mars is the ruby jewel in our night sky and arguably the hottest travel destination in the Solar System. Thanks to a robot invasion from Earth that began in the 1960’s, we probably know more about Mars than any other destination in the Solar System combined. Not bad for a planet so cool that the average summer temperatures rivals a winter in Antarctica. It might be freezing, there might be nothing for a human to breathe, but of all planets we know this rocky, red one is the most similar to home. Pack a good spacesuit and plenty of oxygen and prepare to be amazed. Here, under butterscotch skies, are vast rust-colored deserts and titanic canyons, towering volcanoes three times as high as Everest and mile-deep polar caps made of two different kinds of ice. This journey itself is a space traveler’s dream: a short hop to the planet next door and a wealth of things to see and do. Here, on the fourth rock from the Sun, is our best chance to step into the rest of the Universe and the most likely place we know to encounter the alien life-forms we might share it with.

Space Traveler takes you on a tour into the Solar System’s Hot Zone to visit the two planets both laying claim to the title of ‘Real Hell’. While tiny Mercury blisters in the roasting glare of the Sun, cross over to the dark side and you’ll find the temperature plummets over 600 degrees Celsius. Back away from the Sun to cool off and we encounter Venus, our nearest neighbor. Smothered by a climate gone mad, a romantic visit to our sister planet’s tortured scenery means diving into an atmosphere hot enough to melt lead, where acid smog eats bare metal for breakfast. What happened to turn our planetary neighbors so astonishingly alien? What can a visit tell us about our own?

Pluto is so far away from Earth that it is a mere pinprick of light in our powerful telescopes. Locked in a gravitational dance with its largest moon Charon, this frozen outpost is simply the first discovered body in an unseen swarm of icy worlds. Learn what it would take for humans to journey to the uncharted limits of our solar neighborhood and what NASA scientists think we'll find when we get there.

Got time for a 24 year vacation? Then consider a journey to our most distant planets, the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. There’s only ever been one Earthly visitor to this ice zone, the Voyager mission, launched in 1977. What would it be like to follow in its wake, for a human to undertake one of the greatest journeys in space exploration? How would you get there? What would you see? And would you ever survive? Strap yourselves in for an incredible voyage to the outer Solar System.