Color Your Universe Week 4

coloring page featuring Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Perseverance Rover, the Voyager missions, and the asteroid belt
November 25, 2020
Language
  • english

Here are a few NASA highlights featured in this coloring page:

  • Currently in route to the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance rover is expected to land on Mars on February 18, 2021. The rover will seek signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth by a future mission. Riding along with Perseverance is the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, a technology demonstration to test powered flight on another world for the first time.
  • NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 are currently exploring interstellar space, where no spacecraft from Earth has flown before. The Voyagers' science goals were to conduct closeup studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and the larger moons of the two planets. Voyager 2 then flew past the planets Uranus and Neptune, too! The twin spacecraft journeyed beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets until, in 2012 (Voyager 1) and 2018 (Voyager 2), they entered interstellar space, meaning they exited the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun called the heliosphere. A unique kind of time capsule, called the Golden Record, is attached to each spacecraft, with special symbols and messages intended to communicate a story of our world.
  • Asteroids are remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. They are mostly made of rock, metal, or a combination of both. Scientists believe that the asteroid 16 Psyche – a giant metal-rich asteroid, that orbits the Sun about three times farther away than Earth – could reveal new information about how planets form. Launching in August 2022, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will be the first mission to investigate a world likely made largely of metal, rather than rock or ice.

Use our Eyes on the Solar System online interactive to explore NASA spacecraft and planets in our solar system using real mission data!

What else can you uncover in the picture? Here are a few hints to help you out!

  1. Where you can find the hit tunes of our universe
  2. A bot with questions about life
  3. How an asteroid holds up its pants
  4. A spacecraft headed for a metal world