Venus Planet Coloring Page: Free Printable PDF Sheet

Venus and Its Thick Swirling Clouds

Earth's So-Called Twin

Venus is often called Earth's twin because it is nearly the same size, measuring about 7,521 miles across compared to Earth's 7,918 miles, and it is built from similar rocky material. Despite those similarities, Venus is one of the least hospitable places in the solar system, with a surface hot enough to melt lead and an atmosphere nearly 100 times heavier than Earth's own air pressure.

Venus is the second planet from the sun and the closest planetary neighbor to Earth, coming within about 25 million miles at its nearest approach, closer than any other planet ever gets to us.

Clouds Made of Something Surprising

The swirling bands wrapped around Venus in this scene represent thick clouds made mostly of sulfuric acid rather than water vapor, floating high above a surface that is completely hidden from ordinary telescopes. Those clouds reflect sunlight so efficiently that Venus becomes the brightest planet in Earth's night sky, often visible as a bright point of light known as the morning star or evening star depending on the season.

Wind speeds inside Venus's upper clouds reach roughly 224 miles per hour, so fast that the entire cloud layer circles the planet in about four Earth days, even though the solid planet underneath spins far more slowly.

The Planet With the Longest Day

Venus spins so slowly on its axis that a single Venusian day, one full rotation, takes about 243 Earth days, longer than the 225 Earth days Venus needs to complete one full orbit around the sun. That means a day on Venus technically lasts longer than its entire year, a strange combination no other planet in the solar system shares.

Venus also spins backward compared to most planets, a pattern called retrograde rotation, meaning the sun would appear to rise in the west and set in the east if anyone could see through its thick clouds to watch. Scientists suspect a colossal ancient collision may have flipped Venus onto this backward spin billions of years ago, though the exact cause is still debated among planetary researchers.

Missions That Studied the Scorching World

The Soviet Venera program sent multiple landers to Venus's surface in the 1970s and 1980s, and Venera 13 managed to survive the crushing pressure and 867-degree Fahrenheit heat long enough to send back the first color photographs ever taken from the ground of another planet. Those images showed a rocky, orange-tinted landscape under a thick hazy sky.

NASA's Magellan spacecraft later used radar to map almost the entire surface of Venus through its clouds in the early 1990s, revealing volcanoes, vast lava plains, and mountain ranges that scientists could never have observed with ordinary cameras.

More recent missions, including Japan's Akatsuki orbiter launched in 2010, have studied Venus's swirling cloud patterns for years at a time, tracking a mysterious atmospheric feature called the Venus bow that stretches across the entire dayside of the planet and stays locked in place even as the clouds beneath it race around at hurricane speed. NASA and the European Space Agency both plan new Venus missions in the coming decade to study its surface, atmosphere, and geologic history in far greater detail than earlier flybys allowed.