What does Venus weigh?
Don’t you know you’re never supposed to ask a lady her weight? I can probably get away with telling her mass, though, which is about 4.87×1024 kilograms (Or to write it in tonnes: 4870 million million million tonnes). That means that Venus has about 82% of the Earth’s mass. Of course, mass and weight are two totally different things (even though the units we normally use for them happen to match up on the surface of the Earth). Like all orbiting objects, from astronauts to planets, Venus is totally weightless. An object only has weight when it resists the pull of gravity by, for example, standing on the ground. Since orbiting objects are technically in freefall, they do not resist gravity at all and so have no weight.
Written by Allen Versfeld
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