Thursday

Raven spreads the NASA fact sheet on the Sky Deck step. "The distance row. All nine, in millions of kilometers."

Rocket reads down. "Fifty-eight, 108, 150, 228. Then a jump to 778. Then 1432, 2867, 4515."

"What do you notice about the jumps?" Raven asks.

"They get bigger every time," Rocket says. "Mars to Jupiter is a huge jump. Uranus to Neptune is even bigger."

Nova hovers over the last column. "Pluto is on the sheet too," she says. "Compare its gap with the others."

Rocket nods. "That gap is bigger than the whole inner system, many times over." Raven writes it down. "Patterns in a row of numbers. That is reading data."

The NASA Planetary Fact Sheet gives each world's average distance from the Sun in millions of kilometers.

The Moon is listed too, but its number is its distance from Earth, not from the Sun. It is marked that way on the sheet.

Today you read the whole row and look for patterns, just as a scientist would.

The four inner planets all lie within 228 million kilometers of the Sun. Then comes a long gap to Jupiter.

The asteroid belt sits in that gap, between Mars and Jupiter.

Each outer planet is far from its neighbors. Saturn is about twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter. Uranus is about twice as far as Saturn.

Neptune, the farthest planet, is about 30 times Earth's distance. Pluto, a dwarf planet, averages about 39 times.

The Moon's average distance from Earth is about 0.384 million kilometers, or 384,000 kilometers. That is tiny next to any planet's distance.

Sharp reading. Tomorrow you connect these distances to spacecraft, city blocks and your own neighborhood.