With nature’s insanity and humanity’s ingenuity, our solar system is chock full of strange and beautiful things. Well, actually, it’s chock full of , but if you could zoom around and sight-see, you’d come across some wondrous objects, both natural and manmade. Click through to see a collection of our favorites.

FIRST:

Mariner Valley/Valles Marineris

This mosaic shows the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

If you ripped open the United States latitudinally, you’d be close to having a scar the size of Mars’ , the largest known canyon in the solar system. It stretches for 2,500 miles at a depth that could house Mount Everest, covering about a fifth of the entire distance around the planet. And unlike our not-so-, formed largely from erosion by the Colorado River, is thought to be the result of tectonic activity during the formation of the planet itself.

NEXT:

“Fallen Astronaut”

A small statue and plaque on the moon commemorate astronauts and cosmonauts who have died. (NASA)

The astronauts of Apollo 15 performed an act of quiet disobedience when they left a small aluminum likeness of a man on the surface of the moon, meant to commemorate the 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who had died prior to their 1971 mission. NASA closely monitors each object brought into space, but the mission’s crew, David Scott, Alfred Worden and James Irwin, brought the along privately, only revealing their actions in a press conference after the mission. The revelation, as well as the artist’s attempts to sell of the statue, brought much controversy, but the original statue, along with a plaque of the names of the fallen, still sits on the moon, lonely, noble, silent.

NEXT:

Diamonds

An artist's depiction shows a robot mining for diamonds on Saturn. (Michael Carroll)

Rainstorms on Saturn are a lot more beautiful —and a whole lot more dangerous —than they are on Earth. Instead of water, the planet rains , the result of tiny bits of carbon accumulating under great pressures and temperatures. The process also occurs on Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus, meaning our outer solar system is likely downright inundated with little hunks of diamond.

NEXT:

Saturn’s giant ring

Saturn's giant outer ring dwarfs the planet and the rest of its ring system. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck)

Saturn is known for its system of rings, but in 2009, astronomers discovered a massive outer ring starting about 3.7 million miles away from the planet. The ring is composed of disparate dust particles and is so cold and distant that it reflects little visual light. It wasn’t until astronomers used data from the Spitzer telescope, which sees in the infrared, that they picked up on the existence of the ring, which is thick enough vertically to store about a billion Earths.

NEXT:

Space Debris

An artist's impression shows debris objects in orbit around Earth. The debris field is based on actual data, but the image does not show items in their actual size or density. (P. Carril/ESA)

In 2009, U.S. communication satellite Iridium 33 slammed into Russian military satellite Kosmos-2251 at a speed about 80 times that of a commercial airliner in the first instance of an unintentional space collision. The accident produced more than 2,200 fragments, adding to the well-documented growing problem of — loose bits and pieces leftover from launches, moon missions and space walks (not to mention China’s highly questioned 2007 decision to blow up one of its own ). About 170 million bits of detritus larger than a millimeter are whizzing around Earth with no atmosphere to slow them down, and our presence in space is only growing.

NEXT:

Volcanoes on Io

In 1979, Voyager 1 took this photo of a volcanic eruption on Io. (NASA Planetary Photojournal)

Jupiter’s moon wanders a strange path, its parent planet and larger moons tugging on its orbit like dogs over a bone. As a result, its solid surface surges in waves far bigger than those of Earth’s oceans, never settling, constantly churning molten lava and liquid rocks and spewing material 200 miles into the air, making it the most volcanically active body in the solar system.

NEXT:

Storms

This Voyager 2 image shows the region of Jupiter extending from the equator to the southern polar latitudes in the neighborhood of the Great Red Spot. A white oval, different from the one observed in a similar position at the time of the Voyager 1 encounter, is situated south of the Great Red Spot. (NASA)

There’s a whole lot of weather going on outside of Earth, and sometimes it takes the shape of truly awesome storms. How awesome? Well, a " target="_blank"storm on Jupiter bigger than a handful of Earths, known as the Great Red Spot, has been raging longer than the United States has been a country. ’s storms have clouds 10 to 20 times taller than similar storm clouds on Earth and can throw ice 100 miles into the air. And nearly every year, Mars is engulfed in angry that overtake much, if not all, of the planet’s surface for months at a time. Space is a rough place.

NEXT:

Venus

Venus appears as a black dot as it moves across the sun from the perspective of Earth. Venus is the only planet on which the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. (NASA/SDA/AIA)

Earth’s hellish neighbor Venus is all kinds of confused: Its day is longer than its year, its clouds are made of sulfuric acid and the whole wild thing . Scientists aren’t quite sure why it spins the opposite direction of all the other planets. Some have posited that it spins the right way, but upside-down; others say the strong gravitational pull from the sun slowed its rotation so much that it stopped and then reversed direction.

NEXT:

Dead spacecraft

The people of Earth have sent a whole bunch of robots into space since Sputnik became the first satellite in 1957. And when their missions are over, they face various fates: Some crash into whatever planet or moon they were studying; some deorbit, falling proudly back to Earth; and some are left to wander the solar system, forever out of communication with the planet that birthed them. The most recent addition to this last group is Deep Impact, a comet-hunting craft that, after eight years of science, is now adrift in the solar system, wildly and unreachable by human contact.

NEXT:

Earth

Against the moon's barren surface, Earth's liveliness truly stands out. (NASA)

Yup, Earth. Our home planet is by far the weirdest thing in the solar system, with all of its life-having and everything. While features once thought to be unique to Earth are being found elsewhere — liquid water, weather, possibly — Earth still stubbornly insists on being the only planet to explore the others. It may be a bit of a narcissist. It’s the only planet to have taken a or its accomplishments into interstellar space, but given that it’s a pretty great place, maybe its ego is justified.

NEXT:

3-D Printer

Tools and parts made by a 3D printer are displayed at Made in Space on Monday, Sept. 16, 2013, in Mountain View, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

OK, so this one isn’t done yet, but in 2014, NASA plans to send a on a supply mission to the International Space Station so astronauts can print tools and instruments from orbit rather than waiting on costly rockets to bring them up from Earth. How cool is it? Well, Andrew Filo, a consultant with NASA, had this to say to the Associated Press: “Any time we realize we can 3-D print something in space, it’s like Christmas.”