Level 1

The solar system is very big. However, it is very small compared to the universe. Two friends make a model. It is a model of the solar system. This model is very big. The men make it in the Nevada desert.

They make this model because it is accurate. It shows the real size of the planets. Many people check their innovation online every day. This is what makes the model special. It is the only model which is this accurate.

The friends film the model. You can see the planets move. This is one of the most wonderful space models.

Difficult words: universe (everything which exists in space; the cosmos), solar system (the sun and planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), compared to (if you compare to things, you put them close together and see how big or small they are), accurate (an accurate model shows you things correctly).

Level 2

There is a lot which we don’t know about the universe. It has always been a mystery. What we know is that it’s really, really big. The solar system, for example, is extremely small compared to the whole universe.

Two filmmaker friends said that every picture of the Solar System is wrong – the pictures are not to scale. In other words, they are not as big or small in the picture as they are in the space. The friends decided to make a model which is to scale. They created the model in the Nevada desert.

A marble represented each planet, and each marble was lit by a LED light. The planets moved around in the desert at night. The filmmakers turned this into a film. So, the whole process is easy to watch now.

Difficult words: to scale (if things on a map are to scale, they are as small or as big as they should be compared to other things on the map), marble (a small ball of coloured glass), verb: light – lit – lit.

Level 3

The universe has always made the human being realize there is a lot yet to be discovered. In the context of the whole universe, our solar system is absolutely tiny.

Furthermore, it is never illustrated or modelled to scale because if you were to illustrate the system on paper, the planets would actually be microscopic, and therefore invisible.

Filmmaker friends Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh made an amazing video of our solar system by creating a 7-mile model in the Nevada, USA, desert. The planets for the ‘true illustration of our place in the universe’ were represented by marbles and spheres lit by LED lights.

The representative orbits of the planets were mapped out using GPS calculations, and the planets were driven around these paths in the desert at night. A time-lapse video filmed from a nearby mountain shows every sphere’s orbit.

Difficult words: tiny (very small), to scale (at a comparable size), marble (a small ball of coloured glass), sphere (ball).