Scale Model Solar System

The PVCC Scale Model Solar System (SMSS) stretches the length of four football fields (about a quarter of a mile), beginning with the Sun at the northwest corner of the J-Building and ending with Pluto near the south entrance of the Center for the Performing Arts, on the main campus of Paradise Valley Community College. There are 14 stations - two informational, one of the Sun, nine for each of the planets, and two for the two asteroid belts.

PVCC's SMSS is a true scale model at a scale of 1:15,000,000,000 (that is 1 to 15 billion). One inch on the surface of our model Sun sphere is equivalent to 15 billion inches (240,000 miles, or 10 times around the Earth's Equator) on the surface of the real Sun. Every step you take in our model is equal to 15 billion steps in the actual solar system. Also, because this is a true scale model, when you stand at our Earth station and look at our Sun sphere, it will appear exactly the same size as the Sun does in our sky.

The Sun is represented as a golden sphere 3.5 inches in diameter. As examples for the planets, Jupiter is 1/3 inch in diameter and Earth just under 1 mm in diameter. Most of the planets are represented as three-dimensional spheres and are silver in color. The Moon can only be represented as a dot and is about 1 inch away from the Earth.

The largest scale model solar system is in Maine and stretches 40 miles. The most expensive is located outside the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC. Some other elaborate scale models are located in Boston, MA (the Sun is at the Boston Museum of Science, and the model stretches 20 miles, housed in various buildings along the way), Ithaca, NY (spanning the outside downtown area), and Boulder, CO (outside on the University of Colorado-Boulder campus).

Here in Arizona, the most detailed solar system is located at Lowell Observatory on Mars Hill in Flagstaff. This model, however, is not true-to-scale, as the distances between the planets have been artificially compressed by a factor of twenty.

As of 2007, PVCC's SMSS is the most detailed true scale model solar system in the desert Southwestern United States.

The SMSS was constructed over the course of a year and at a cost of just 2% that of the Washington, DC model. At the expense of the planets in our model being rather small, the path from the Sun to Uranus is a straight line and will allow viewers to get a firm grasp of the true scale of the solar system, an effect lost in the larger models (where one often cannot see from one planet to the next).

An important feature that separates PVCC's model from others is its flexibility. The text and graphics for each station can be readily updated and swapped out as this information will be contained on specially laminated paper under protective lexan covers. This design feature takes advantage of the unique geographical location of Phoenix with its mild year-round climate.

We plan to update each station roughly every 6 months, so our SMSS will be a living tribute to our solar system. If a new planet is discovered in the outer solar system, we can update the information relating to it that day. Other model solar systems of comparable caliber, in the United States and worldwide, do not appear to have this capability. Our design also supports the idea of locating the model at our campus where our students can work on updating the text and graphics information as the need arises.

An introductory station describes how the size of the solar system compares to the scale of the distribution of local stars, the span of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and the large scale structure of the galaxies that make up our Universe, out to the edge of what we are capable of observing with our largest modern telescopes.

Tours of the SMSS are available for students and the community at large, including middle schools and high schools. The SMSS will also be incorporated as part of laboratory sessions and will be used by PVCC's Kids' College Program each summer.

Please join us, in person at our campus, to experience the wonders of the infinitesimal part of our Universe that is the solar system!   

Contacts for SMSS Campus Tour