50 Fun Facts About Space Trivia for Kids

How many planets are in our Solar System?

Pluto was counted as the ninth until 2006, when astronomers demoted it.

What kind of object is the Sun?

It is a G-type main-sequence star, and it holds about 99.86 percent of all the mass in the Solar System.

Which planet is closest to the Sun?

Oddly, it is not the hottest planet, because it has almost no atmosphere to trap heat.

Which planet is the largest in the Solar System?

You could fit about 1,321 Earths inside it.

The Great Red Spot, the famous feature on the biggest planet, is what?

It has been observed since 1831 and is bigger than the whole Earth.

Which planet is famous for its bright rings, made mostly of ice?

At least 293 moons orbit it too, not counting the hundreds of moonlets inside the rings.

Which planet is nicknamed the Red Planet?

Its rusty colour comes from iron oxide on the surface, and it is home to the tallest volcano in the Solar System.

How many moons does Mars have?

They are called Phobos and Deimos, and both are small and lumpy rather than round.

Which planet is the hottest in the Solar System, even though it is not the closest to the Sun?

Its thick atmosphere traps heat, pushing the surface to about 464 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead.

Which planet spins on its side, tilted over by more than 80 degrees?

It was the first planet discovered with a telescope, by William Herschel in 1781.

Which planet is farthest from the Sun?

It also has the fastest winds of any planet, blowing at up to 2,100 kilometres per hour.

In 2006, Pluto was officially reclassified as what?

It lives in the Kuiper belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond the eighth planet.

The asteroid belt sits between the orbits of which two planets?

It holds tens of thousands of rocks bigger than a kilometre across, plus Ceres, the biggest object in the belt.

Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?

He stepped out on July 20, 1969, and Buzz Aldrin followed him down the ladder nineteen minutes later.

What was the name of the Apollo 11 lunar module that landed on the Moon?

Columbia was the command module that Michael Collins flew around the Moon while the others were on the surface.

How many people in total have walked on the Moon?

They arrived on six Apollo landings between 1969 and 1972, and nobody has been back since.

Who was the first human to travel into space, in 1961?

His Vostok 1 flight made a single orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961.

Who was the first woman in space?

She flew solo aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963, twenty years before the first American woman went up.

What was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957?

Its beeping radio signal could be picked up around the world for 22 days until the batteries ran out.

What kind of animal was Laika, the first creature to orbit the Earth?

She was a stray from the streets of Moscow and flew on Sputnik 2 in November 1957.

What is the name of the galaxy that our Solar System belongs to?

It is a barred spiral, and we sit out on the inner edge of one of its arms, the Orion Arm.

Which is the largest moon in the whole Solar System?

It orbits the biggest planet and is larger than the smallest one.

Halley's Comet can be seen from Earth roughly how often?

Edmond Halley worked out that three comet sightings were the same object and correctly predicted its return in 1758.

Which star sits almost directly above Earth's North Pole and barely seems to move in the night sky?

All the other northern stars appear to circle around it, which is why sailors used it to find north.

Which spacecraft, launched in 1977, became the most distant human-made object in 1998?

It overtook Pioneer 10 in 1998, became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012 and was still sending back data in 2025.

Which famous space telescope, launched into orbit in 1990, was still working in 2025?

Its main mirror was ground slightly wrong, so astronauts had to fly up and fix it in 1993.

What kind of light does the James Webb Space Telescope mainly study?

It has to be kept colder than minus 223 degrees Celsius so its own heat does not spoil the pictures.

What was Ingenuity, which made history on Mars in April 2021?

It was the first aircraft to make a powered, controlled flight on another world, and it kept flying until 2024.

A glowing streak of light from a small space rock burning up in Earth's atmosphere is called what?

Most people call it a shooting star, but it is usually just a pebble-sized meteoroid.

The word astronaut comes from two Ancient Greek words meaning what?

Russian space travellers are called cosmonauts instead, from the word for space.

A light-year measures what?

It is how far light travels in one year, about 9.46 trillion kilometres.

How high above the Earth does the International Space Station orbit?

That is low enough to stay below the Van Allen radiation belts and most space junk.

Which is the second-largest moon in the Solar System and the only one with a thick atmosphere?

It is larger than the smallest planet but far less massive.

What is the tallest volcano in the Solar System, found on Mars?

It stands about 21.9 kilometres high, roughly two and a half times the height of Mount Everest.

In what year did Apollo 11 land the first people on the Moon?

The Soviet probe Luna 15 crashed onto the Moon the very next day while the astronauts were still on the surface.

How long does light from the Sun take to reach Earth?

So when you look at the Sun, you are seeing it as it was eight minutes ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on which holiday in 2021?

It rode an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on 25 December 2021.

What did the Apollo 11 astronauts name the spot where they landed on the Moon?

A fifth of the world's population watched the moonwalk live on television.

Roughly how wide is the Milky Way galaxy?

Yet it is only about 1,000 light-years thick out in the spiral arms, so it is shaped a bit like a pizza.

Roughly how many people watched the first moonwalk live on TV in 1969?

That was about one in five people alive at the time.

Which planet is so light for its size that it would float in a big enough bathtub of water?

It is about 30 percent less dense than water, the only planet in the Solar System that light. Its famous rings are made mostly of ice.

Roughly what share of all the mass in the Solar System belongs to the Sun?

The Sun holds about 99.86 percent of the mass and is around 330,000 times heavier than Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times Earth's.

Which spacecraft is the only one ever to have visited the farthest planet, flying past in 1989?

It flew by on 25 August 1989 and photographed the Great Dark Spot, a storm that later vanished. Neptune's biggest moon is Triton.

How much of Earth's surface is covered by ocean?

Earth is the only world in the Solar System known to keep liquid water on its surface, which is why it looks blue from space.

Who discovered the four biggest moons of the largest planet in 1610 using an early telescope?

Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto can be spotted with ordinary binoculars. Ganymede is bigger than the planet Mercury.

A year on the planet closest to the Sun lasts how many Earth days?

Mercury spins so slowly that one side stays in sunlight for a whole 88-day year, then sits in darkness for the next orbit.

NASA's rover Perseverance got its name from a 2019 contest won by what kind of entrant?

Alexander Mather of Burke, Virginia, beat more than 28,000 essays from K-12 students. The rover landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021.

Which mission was the first to land a robot spacecraft on a comet?

The European Space Agency's probe dropped its lander Philae onto comet 67P in 2014. NASA's Deep Impact instead blasted a crater in comet Tempel 1.

What was the first human-made object to touch the Moon, in 1959?

The Soviet probe crashed onto the surface a decade before Apollo 11. After Luna 24 in 1976 there were no soft landings until China's Chang'e 3 in 2013.

The Apollo moon suits had a white Ortho-Fabric outer layer. How many layers did a suit have in all?

The A7L stack included a liner, a cooling garment, a pressure bladder and five aluminised insulation layers to shield astronauts from heat and micrometeoroids.