Getting your questions ready
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50 free Space Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Space trivia for kids works best when it starts with the things every kid already wonders about: how many planets there are, which one is biggest, who walked on the Moon first, and what a shooting star really is. These 50 questions begin there and build up to comets, telescopes and the record-breaking spacecraft that older kids love. The set covers the Sun and the eight planets, the Moon landings, the first astronauts and cosmonauts, the International Space Station, Hubble and James Webb, and a few big ideas like light-years and galaxies. Every answer is checked against a cited source and each explanation adds one more fact to remember. Use it for a classroom science warm-up, a bedtime quiz or a family game night. Play a round now and see how many you can get right.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many planets are in our Solar System?
Eight
Pluto was counted as the ninth until 2006, when astronomers demoted it.
Q 02What kind of object is the Sun?
A star
It is a G-type main-sequence star, and it holds about 99.86 percent of all the mass in the Solar System.
Q 03Which planet is closest to the Sun?
Mercury
Oddly, it is not the hottest planet, because it has almost no atmosphere to trap heat.
Q 04Which planet is the largest in the Solar System?
Jupiter
You could fit about 1,321 Earths inside it.
Q 05The Great Red Spot, the famous feature on the biggest planet, is what?
A giant storm
It has been observed since 1831 and is bigger than the whole Earth.
Q 06Which planet is famous for its bright rings, made mostly of ice?
Saturn
At least 293 moons orbit it too, not counting the hundreds of moonlets inside the rings.
Q 07Which planet is nicknamed the Red Planet?
Mars
Its rusty colour comes from iron oxide on the surface, and it is home to the tallest volcano in the Solar System.
Q 08How many moons does Mars have?
Two
They are called Phobos and Deimos, and both are small and lumpy rather than round.
Q 09Which planet is the hottest in the Solar System, even though it is not the closest to the Sun?
Venus
Its thick atmosphere traps heat, pushing the surface to about 464 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead.
Q 10Which planet spins on its side, tilted over by more than 80 degrees?
Uranus
It was the first planet discovered with a telescope, by William Herschel in 1781.
Q 11Which planet is farthest from the Sun?
Neptune
It also has the fastest winds of any planet, blowing at up to 2,100 kilometres per hour.
Q 12In 2006, Pluto was officially reclassified as what?
A dwarf planet
It lives in the Kuiper belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond the eighth planet.
Q 13The asteroid belt sits between the orbits of which two planets?
Mars and Jupiter
It holds tens of thousands of rocks bigger than a kilometre across, plus Ceres, the biggest object in the belt.
Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?
Q 21What is the name of the galaxy that our Solar System belongs to?
The Milky Way
It is a barred spiral, and we sit out on the inner edge of one of its arms, the Orion Arm.
Q 22Which is the largest moon in the whole Solar System?
Ganymede
It orbits the biggest planet and is larger than the smallest one.
Q 23Halley's Comet can be seen from Earth roughly how often?
Every 76 years
Edmond Halley worked out that three comet sightings were the same object and correctly predicted its return in 1758.
Which star sits almost directly above Earth's North Pole and barely seems to move in the night sky?
Neil Armstrong
He stepped out on July 20, 1969, and Buzz Aldrin followed him down the ladder nineteen minutes later.
Q 15What was the name of the Apollo 11 lunar module that landed on the Moon?
Eagle
Columbia was the command module that Michael Collins flew around the Moon while the others were on the surface.
Q 16How many people in total have walked on the Moon?
Twelve
They arrived on six Apollo landings between 1969 and 1972, and nobody has been back since.
Q 17Who was the first human to travel into space, in 1961?
Yuri Gagarin
His Vostok 1 flight made a single orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961.
Q 18Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
She flew solo aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963, twenty years before the first American woman went up.
Q 19What was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957?
The first artificial satellite
Its beeping radio signal could be picked up around the world for 22 days until the batteries ran out.
Q 20What kind of animal was Laika, the first creature to orbit the Earth?
A dog
She was a stray from the streets of Moscow and flew on Sputnik 2 in November 1957.
Polaris
All the other northern stars appear to circle around it, which is why sailors used it to find north.
Q 25Which spacecraft, launched in 1977, became the most distant human-made object in 1998?
Voyager 1
It overtook Pioneer 10 in 1998, became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012 and was still sending back data in 2025.
Q 26Which famous space telescope, launched into orbit in 1990, was still working in 2025?
Hubble
Its main mirror was ground slightly wrong, so astronauts had to fly up and fix it in 1993.
Q 27What kind of light does the James Webb Space Telescope mainly study?
Infrared
It has to be kept colder than minus 223 degrees Celsius so its own heat does not spoil the pictures.
Q 28What was Ingenuity, which made history on Mars in April 2021?
A helicopter
It was the first aircraft to make a powered, controlled flight on another world, and it kept flying until 2024.
Q 29A glowing streak of light from a small space rock burning up in Earth's atmosphere is called what?
A meteor
Most people call it a shooting star, but it is usually just a pebble-sized meteoroid.
Q 30The word astronaut comes from two Ancient Greek words meaning what?
Star sailor
Russian space travellers are called cosmonauts instead, from the word for space.