"Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see."
— Leonardo da Vinci, margin note for the curiousOrbits & sizes simplified for the bench — not to scale, but true in spirit.
Pick a planet.
Four rocky worlds close in, four giants farther out — and thousands of dwarf planets and asteroids between and beyond.
Crushing carbon-dioxide air, 92× Earth's pressure. Winds circle the planet in 4 days while the ground barely turns.
Nitrogen and oxygen at 1 atmosphere — the only air we know you can breathe.
Thin carbon-dioxide air, under 1% of Earth's pressure. Dust storms can swallow the whole planet.
Hydrogen and helium thousands of kilometers deep. The Great Red Spot is a storm wider than Earth.
Hydrogen and helium with golden haze. Winds reach 1,800 km/h at the equator.
Methane tints them blue. Neptune's winds top 2,000 km/h — the fastest in the solar system.
Drones can't fly there — rotors need air to push against. No atmosphere, no lift, no sound.
A day on Venus (243 Earth days) is longer than its year (225 days) — and it spins the wrong way.
It's the only planet less dense than water. Find a big enough ocean and it would bob like a beach ball.
Pioneer 10 & 11 (1972–73) carry a gold plaque engraved with two human figures, the Sun's position mapped against 14 pulsars, and the spacecraft's path out of the solar system.
Voyager 1 & 2 (1977) carry the Golden Record: 115 images, greetings in 55 languages, 90 minutes of music — and the sounds of Earth, from surf and thunder to whales and a baby's laugh.
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012. It is now over 160 times farther from the Sun than Earth — the farthest human-made object ever.
Pioneer 10 is drifting toward the star Aldebaran. It will arrive in about 2 million years.
The pulsar map is a clock as well as a map — pulsars slow down at known rates, so whoever finds it could work out when we launched.
Sources: NASA — Pioneer 10/11 gold plaques (1972–73), Voyager 1/2 Golden Records (1977).
Same numbers as the textbooks, drawn so you can feel them.
Distances in astronomical units — 1 AU is the Earth–Sun distance.
Every building block on one bench. Click any element to read its card.
Its name, number, and one honest use will appear here.