The Worst Weather in the Solar System

Earth has some rotten weather. Hurricanes batter everything in their paths. Tornados pick up buildings and cars, tossing them into the sky like confetti. Rain can turn a street into a river in no time. And it's always either too hot or too cold.

Well, count your blessings!

The weather elsewhere in our solar system makes Earth's weather seem mild. Take Mars. Mars is cold. In one Mars day, the temperature can swing from a nice "warm" 23º F at high noon to -125º F at night. Brrr!

Most other places in the solar system are also really cold. They are far from the warmth of the Sun. Most have little or no atmosphere to hold in what little heat they receive.

Mercury and Venus, though, can be quite toasty. These two planets are closest to the Sun. Mercury has no atmosphere to speak of, so temperatures there are all over the map -- from minus 292 to more than 800 F. Venus never cools off, not even at night. Its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide acts like the glass of a greenhouse, letting heat in, but not letting it out.

In the wind category, Earth is wimpy in spite of its hurricanes and tornadoes. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are gas giants. They are mostly atmosphere. The winds in their atmospheres blow far faster than any winds on Earth. At 1,600 miles per hour, Neptune's winds are the fastest in the solar system.

Whew! It's enough to keep track of the weather on our own planet. To help with that, we have the GOES-the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. The two GOES watch over all of North America and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, warning of developing storms so people can get out of harm's way in time.

Discover more about the GOES and weather in the solar system. Visit The Space Place at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/goes/planets.

This article was written by Diane K. Fisher and provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.