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October 6, 2017
Q. Some of us terrestrial beings have a real fascination with all things extraterrestrial, including why a day on Venus is longer than its year, how the almost-million-pound International Space Station (ISS) ever got into orbit, and why the Big Dipper will eventually become the “Big Spatula”?
A. 1: Venus rotates so slowly that it takes 243 Earth days to complete one diurnal spin, says astronomer and columnist Dean Regas in his book “Facts from Space!” And because it is closer to the sun than Earth is, the time it takes to orbit the sun once is only 225 days. In fact, Venus is the only planet in the solar system whose year is shorter than its day.
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