Venus (金星) is close to Earth. 【小题1】   Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Venus is similar to Earth in size and mass (质量). It is often described as Earth’s “sister”.

Scientists have been learning about Venus for a long time. First, they looked at Venus through telescopes (望远镜). But Venus is covered with thick clouds. 【小题2】 So, they made guesses about it.

For a long time, scientists thought that Venus had water and plants. They thought Venus might have animals, too. 【小题3】

【小题4】 In the 1960s, they began sending probes (航天探测器) to Venus. The probes flew through the thick clouds. They took pictures of Venus up close. They found out many things, too. The probes sent the pictures and things they found out back to the scientists.

【小题5】 First, they learned that most of their guesses were not right. And they learned that Venus is very hot.

In our solar system (太阳系), some planets have a great number of moons (卫星) while some have none. Recently scientists have discovered 12 more moons going around Jupiter (木星). That means Jupiter now has a total of 92 moons, more than any other planet in our solar system.

Scott Sheppard was a member of the team that made the latest discoveries. The new moons were found using telescopes (望远镜) in Hawaii and Chile. Sheppard said, “I hope we can take clear photos of one of these moons in the near future to better understand it.”

Jupiter’s newly discovered moons are between one and three kilometers in size. They have not yet been named, as half of them are too small—less than 1.5 kilometers—to own a name.

Sheppard has already taken part in 70 moon discoveries for Jupiter. He also discovered moons going around Saturn (土星). It had been the planet with the most moons until the most recent announcement. It now is known to have 83 moons. Saturn held the top position since 2019 when Sheppard’s team discovered 20 more moons. Before that, Jupiter was the solar system’s leader with 79 moons.

Sheppard expects to keep adding moons to both Jupiter and Saturn in the future. Uranus and Neptune also have many small moons. But they are much farther from Earth, so discovering new moons around those planets is more difficult.

This year, the European Space Agency has sent a spaceship to explore Jupiter. The spaceship, called JUICE, took off in April. The task is to make further research on Jupiter and its three large moons.

Have you ever dreamed of traveling in space? To travel in space, we first have to work out where our food will come from.

Today's space travellers don't go to the Moon or Mars. They go to the International Space Station（ISS）. There, the spacemen live for weeks to months.

If you visited the ISS years ago, nearly every kind of food you ate would have come from the Earth.

In 2014, scientists sent the ISS a space garden with some vegetable seeds（种子）. With water and some light, the vegetables in the garden grew. Those were the first foods being grown on the ISS. But the spacemen couldn't eat them and had to send them back to the Earth. The next year, after scientists made sure they were safe, the spacemen grew a second crop. This time the vegetables were ready for the spacemen to eat.

Gardening is different in space than it is on Earth. Without gravity, plants don't know which way is up. But they learn how to grow. They send their leaves in the direction of light and their roots into the soil.

The spacemen also have grown vegetables as well as flowers. It's important to know a plant can flower in space, because flowering is part of how some plants make fruit.

While the space garden is small for now, hopefully it could one day help provide people with food on long-time space trips.