Solar System course of its year. A body's closest approach to the Sun is called its "perihelion", whereas its most distant point from the Sun is called its "aphelion". The orbits of the planets are nearly circular, but many comets, asteroids, and Kuiper belt objects follow highly elliptical orbits. The positions of the bodies in the Solar System can be predicted using numerical models. Although the Sun dominates the system by mass, it accounts for only about 2% of the angular momentum. The planets, dominated by Jupiter, account for most of the rest of the angular momentum due to the combination of
Sagan Planet Walk Sagan Planet Walk The Sciencenter's Sagan Planet Walk is a walkable scale model of the Solar System, located in Ithaca, New York. The model scales the entire Solar System—both planet size and distances between them—down to one five billionth of its actual size. Consisting of eleven obelisks situated along a path through the streets of downtown Ithaca, the Planet Walk leads from the Sun at Center Ithaca to Pluto at the Ithaca Sciencenter. The exhibition was originally created in 1997 in memory of Ithaca resident and Cornell Professor Carl Sagan. In 2012, the model was expanded to include a representation