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Venus has an orbit with a semi-major axis of 0.723 au (108,200,000 km; 67,200,000 mi), and an eccentricity of 0.007. [1] [2] The low eccentricity and comparatively small size of its orbit give Venus the least range in distance between perihelion and aphelion of the planets: 1.46 million km.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, making a full orbit in about 224 days. Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 0.72 AU (108 million km; 67 million mi), and completes an orbit every 224.7 days. It completes 13 orbits in 7.998 years, so its position in our sky almost repeats every eight years.
A transit occurs when Venus reaches conjunction with the Sun whilst also passing through the Earth's orbital plane, and passes directly across the face of the Sun. [citation needed] [note 1] Sequences of transits usually repeat every 243 years, after which Venus and Earth have returned to nearly the same point in their respective orbits.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Venus: . Venus – second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. It has the longest rotation period (243 days) of any planet in the Solar System and rotates in the opposite direction to most other planets.
According to the IAU's explicit count, there are eight planets in the Solar System; four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and four giant planets, which can be divided further into two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and two ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). When excluding the Sun, the four giant planets account for more than ...
With a few exceptions, the farther a planet or belt is from the Sun, the larger the distance between its orbit and the orbit of the next nearest object to the Sun. For example, Venus is approximately 0.33 AU farther out from the Sun than Mercury, whereas Saturn is 4.3 AU out from Jupiter, and Neptune lies 10.5 AU out from Uranus.
Because its orbit takes it between the Earth and the Sun, Venus as seen from Earth exhibits visible phases in much the same manner as the Earth's Moon. Galileo Galilei observed the phases of Venus in December 1610, an observation which supported Copernicus's then-contentious heliocentric description of the Solar System. [13]
[19] [20] Planned orbit for the NASA Lunar Gateway in circa 2024, as a highly-elliptical seven-day near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon, which would bring the small space station within 3,000 kilometers (1,900 mi) of the lunar north pole at closest approach and as far away as 70,000 kilometers (43,000 mi) over the lunar south pole.