Product Description: Grades K - 6. A giant mobile kit featuring actual NASA photography. Set includes 9 planets plus the sun and measures 40" across. Facts are included about each of the 10 NASA images.
Editorial Review: The budding, serious astronomer will love this solar-system mobile that features actual NASA photographs. The planets, made of thick, high-quality card stock, are double-sided, highlighting each orb's individual colors and features. The accompanying 16-page guidebook is a great primer and includes some nice passages like, "Perhaps you will someday rocket from Earth to land on the moons, race the comets, or play tag with Saturn's rings." It's enough to make any mobile watcher and potential astronaut starry-eyed. --Keith Simanton
Educational and nice to look at, but very flimsy. I wish that I would have paid more attention to the previous reviewer's comment about this mobile not being very durable. I bought this mobile for my 6 year old son. I loved the fact that they used NASA pictures. This mobile was by far the most attractive looking solar system kit out there that I saw when I was shopping around. There's another kit that has 3D balls that looked very fake and cheap to me. To assemble this mobile you have to use 8 metal rods that you insert into tiny holes. Well, as soon as I would apply the smallest amount of pressure to insert the metal rod into the hole, the rod would bend. By the time I was done inserting all 8 rods, then I had to hang each planet from a rod. Here again, every time I touched one of the metal rods, it would fall out of the tiny hole and I would have to re-insert it. By the time I was done the rods looked really bad. The pros about this mobile are that it is educational (it comes with a poster full of great facts that my son loves reading), the pictures on the planets and sun are beautiful to look at (the detail is amazing), and it uses thread instead of fishing line like other solar system sets out there, which makes this set very easy to hang. The cons are that it is very flimsy and a pain to assemble. But once I actually got the mobile up and all the rods straightened out, I was happy with the way it looked. I'm just hoping my son doesn't shut his bedroom door too quickly causing a big gust of air to knock those metal rods out again!
Beautiful NASA Images No children... bought this mobile for my office, I'm setting my sights on the final frontier. A better mobile might exist, but I never found it. The mobile consists of cardstock photos from NASA; I would not say it is durable, but it hangs from the ceiling so that should not be a deterent... as children should probably not be hanging from the ceiling anyway. It's easy to put together if you have two sets of hands and hangs beautifully once in place. Unlike a lot of the other mobiles I saw, this one has a sun... nice touch. I would highly recommend this product. The world needs more mobiles.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
