The planetary bodies of the solar system are all wildly different from the Earth in size and mass and atmospheric composition. It can be hard to paint a serious picture of this different world but fortunately no one thinks of a great way to show it.
The team on the Bright Side of YouTube has created a great video that shows the difference in altitude that you can achieve by jumping on different planets (plus the Moon and Pluto). The video gives an intuitive idea about the differences between the planets. Assuming you can jump half a meter (1.5 feet) to Earth, the rocky planets will give you some interesting space. Starting close to home, jumping to the moon can easily lift you up 2.7 meters (9 feet), as its gravity is about 1/6 of the Earth’s.
On Venus, you can jump a little higher than Earth, because its gravity is about 91 percent of Earth’s. On Mars, its height is up to 1.2 meters (4 feet) because its gravity is less than 2 percent. You will also feel about Mercury. This may confuse you a bit. Mercury is much smaller and larger than Mars. Why is it so hard to compare gravity? Okay, Mercury is very dense and it makes a lot of difference. You can’t actually stand on the gas giant, so behind the video there are floating platforms to simulate a jump in their atmosphere in the clouds of perfect talents. Be careful, you will notice a significant decrease in the height of your jump. On the larger planet Jupiter, your jump can barely take you up a single flight of stairs.
Saturn, the second largest planet but denser than water, is almost like Earth, when it comes to jumping height, however, at 0.4 meters (1.4 feet). Uranus and Neptune are no different from Earth. It’s really fun when we consider the secondary agencies of the solar system. On Pluto you can jump 7.6 meters (25 feet), because it has about 1/15 of the Earth’s gravity.
But if you don’t want to track the whole way to Pluto, you may have a better experience nearby. Not included in the video, Ceres is the largest asteroid in the belt and the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system. Jumping there can easily take you up to 18 meters (59 feet) high. So be careful when trying to jump into space, different planets will get you wildly different results.
