From the Sun to Saturn! Our return to the Salt Line

Ay up, everyone!  It's Hanley Bear here, with a post about posts - and science, too.

You might remember that, before Christmas, Polar and Grizzly took us for a walk along a disused railway route called The Salt Line, that used to run from Wheelock near Sandbach to Kidsgrove.  As we made our way back to the car, we'd noticed two posts with the names of planets on - the Ice Giants, Uranus and Neptune.

     

Ever since finding these, and working out that they must have been part of a Solar System trail, I've wanted to go back and find the others.  

Finally, last weekend, Polar and Grizzly went back to the Salt Line again.  This time, we left the car at the other end of the path and I soon spotted where the trail of planets began.

The Sun was attached to the fence at the far end of the car park, where the railway line would have carried on but the path stopped, because the land on the other side is all part of a golf course.

The three planets closest to the Sun - Mercury, Venus and our Earth, were all in the car park area.  I told the other bears some strange facts about Mercury, including that it spins so slowly that a 'day' lasts 59 of our Earth days, but is so close to the sun that a year lasts just 88 days.

'Venus is funny too,' I told them.  'It spins in the opposite direction to most of the other planets, but so slowly that a Venus day lasts over 240 Earth days.  In fact, a Venus day lasts longer than a Venus year!'  

I told them that both Mercury and Venus were very, very hot - far too hot for bears - and that Mercury didn't even have a proper atmosphere.  'Although Venus does, it's full of acid!' I added.

The other bears thought this was all very strange and didn't sound very nice at all.

Polar and Grizzly carried us all across the road to where the path ran beside the crossing-keeper's cottage.  It was only a little way along the trail before we found the post for Mars, near where a little robin was singing.

'Isn't there a mission to Mars at the moment?' asked Endon.

'That's right - Perseverance is exploring it right now, looking for evidence of microscopic life,' I said.  'But it's too cold there for bears and there isn't enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us, so we'll have to stay on Earth and encourage humans to look after it better.'

We had reached a very pretty area of woods with a stream running through a little valley and the first few leaves of bluebells just starting to show through the leaf litter.  It was strange thinking than none of the other planets had anywhere as nice as this on them.

We had to be carried quite a long way further on to get to the Jupiter post.  The other bears all knew that Jupiter was the biggest planet and that it was a Gas Giant, but they didn't know that a Jupiter day is lasts less than half an Earth day and that the huge planet has almost 80 moons.

While we were doing some climbing, I tried to imagine how fast Jupiter's upper atmosphere must be moving if such a huge planet rotated twice as fast as the Earth but it made my head feel giddy, so I stopped thinking about space things for a little while and just played like a bear.

We had another fairly long journey in the Bear Bag before we got to Saturn, another Gas Giant planet famous for its rings.  Not long after I joined Sonning's hug, the Cassini mission ended and I got leaky eyes thinking about the little space craft that had made such an incredible journey and taken such amazing pictures burning up in Saturn's atmosphere, and I got slightly leaky eyes again, thinking of it on our walk.

I wanted to go all the way to see the posts for Uranus and Neptune again, but Polar said we didn't have time as we needed to go home for lunch.  She and Grizzly carried us back along a different path, beside the stream and up through some fields, rejoining the Solar Trail between Jupiter and Mars, near the M6 motorway.

'It's funny how the motorway is roughly where the asteroid belt would be!' I said to the other bears.  'I wonder if they thought of that when they were planning the trail?'

Even though the big planets look pretty, with their swirling clouds and rings, they would be impossible to live on and very dark too, as they are such a long way from the sun.  Us bears all agreed that we were lucky bears to have such a lovely, habitable planet.

We hope all our human friends will help us to take care of it.