We live on a planet named Earth.

The Earth orbits around a star which we call The Sun.

It takes just over 365 days (one year) for Earth to complete one circuit around The Sun.

There are nine planets orbiting The Sun. They are named Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. This is our solar system.

Moving away from The Sun, the next planet after Earth is Mars. It is also known as the red planet. This is because the surface of Mars is red. On Mars, there are red rocks and dirt everywhere.

It takes Mars 687 days to orbit The Sun, so a year there is nearly two Earth-years. A day on Mars is 24 earth hours and 37 minutes, so time there is similar to that on Earth.

The Earth has one moon which we call The Moon. Mars has two tiny moons called Phobos (meaning fear) and Deimos (meaning dread). These potato-shaped moons are much smaller than our moon. Phobos is just 22 kilometres in diameter, while Deimos has a diameter of only 12 kilometres. By contrast, the diameter of the Earth's moon is a whopping 3,474 kilometres.

Conditions on the surface of Mars are much closer to habitability than the surface of any other known planet or moon. While there are no bodies of water, the surface temperature ranges between -63°C and -140°C. Mars has just 38% of Earth's gravity, and the atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide.

Will there come a time when people live on Mars? Maybe...if we can overcome the problems of time to travel there, prolonged weightlessness, and taking or finding the things we need to survive.