← The Solar System

Chapter 5

Dwarf planets, comets and missions

Beyond the eight planets, the Solar System is full of smaller worlds. Ceres rules the asteroid belt, Eris forced astronomers to decide what a planet is, and comets, balls of ice and dust, grow tails when they near the Sun. Robots have now visited most of them: Rosetta landed on a comet, DART knocked an asteroid off course, and missions such as Cassini, Juno, Perseverance and BepiColombo keep studying the planets you can watch glowing on their orbits.

12 cards · 🪐 planets in motion

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See the 12 cards
  1. Largest object in the asteroid belt, a dwarf planetCeres
  2. Dwarf planet whose discovery got Pluto demotedEris
  3. Dwarf planets the IAU officially recognises5
  4. What a comet's nucleus is mostly made ofIce and dust
  5. Way a comet's tail always pointsAway from the Sun
  6. Streaks of light from a comet's leftover dustA meteor shower
  7. First mission to land a probe on a comet, in 2014Rosetta
  8. NASA mission that crashed into an asteroid in 2022DART
  9. Glowing on the orbit: the planet Cassini studiedSaturn
  10. Glowing on the orbit: the planet Juno orbitsJupiter
  11. Glowing on the orbit: where Perseverance rovesMars
  12. Glowing on the orbit: BepiColombo's targetMercury