Computer game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and its expansion Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire are set on the planet Chiron in the Alpha Centauri system where all indigenous life appears to behave in accordance with the Gaia philosophy.

This appears to be a result of the rapid rotation and underlying symmetry of the planet.

* Mars ( Biker Mice from Mars ), the planet as it appears in the cartoon series

The series follows a teenage high school girl named Hitomi, who finds herself pulled from Earth to the planet Gaea when a boy named Van appears on the high school track while battling a dragon.

* Sky Moo-A Large blue cow type creature that appears in ' The Seed ' episode, that helps the Clangers by eating all the vegetation that is over running their planet.

* July 25 – British astronomers announce they have found what appears to be an extrasolar planet.

It demonstrates that a pattern emerges to mirror that of the ocean-the tropics do not continue to get warmer because the atmosphere transports warm air poleward and cold air equatorward, the purpose of which appears to be that of heat and moisture distribution around the planet.

Since our planet rotates, it appears to a stationary observer on Earth that a gyroscope's axis is completing a full rotation once every 24 hours.

* The third and fourth together explain retrogradation, when a planet appears to slow down, then briefly reverse its motion through the zodiac.

Jar Jar Binks first appears in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace as a bumbling Gungan from the planet Naboo.

Later during a three-part episode, Qui-Gon appears as a Force ghost twice ; first to Obi-Wan and later to Anakin when they, along with Anakin's Padawan Ahsoka Tano, are trapped on the mysterious planet Mortis.

* Morning star is the name given to the planet Venus when it appears in the east before sunrise ( as though heralding the coming of the morning ).

* Less commonly, Morning Star can refer to the planet Mercury when it appears in the east before sunrise.

Both Olaf and Baleog make an appearance in the 1993 game Rock n ' Roll Racing ; Olaf can be unlocked as a hidden character, while Baleog appears on several billboards advertising " Viking Cola " on the planet Bogmire.

Oa appears as a desert-like, lifeless planet.

In Super Mario Galaxy, an image of his head appears as a wooden planet that Mario can visit in the Space Junk Galaxy.

An unintended consequence of the Space Race is that it facilitated the environmental movement, as this was the first time in history that humans could see their homeworld as it really appears -– the first color pictures from space showed a fragile blue planet bordered by the blackness of space.

* Ireta — A planet in Anne McCaffrey's Planet Pirates series, inhabited by both people and dinosaurs, and so also called Dinosaur Planet – the name of the novel in which it first appears.

Sopdet is the consort of Sah, the constellation of Orion, by which Sirius appears, and the planet Venus was sometimes considered their child.

While hiding from Apaches in a cave, he appears to die ; leaving his inanimate body behind, he is mysteriously transported by a form of astral projection to the planet Mars, where he finds himself re-embodied in a form identical to his earthly one.

Zoidberg's race, the Decapodians — from the sandy, beach-like planet Decapod 10 — are crustaceans, generally lobster-like in appearance — though they have been called squids, crabs or crawdads — with lobster-like claws, mouth tentacles, a hard exoskeleton, a fleshy, boneless interior, a fin that appears atop their heads during mating season or extreme anger, an ink pouch, two stomachs ( one saltwater and one freshwater ), three hearts, ( originally four ), gonopores, a gland that stinks when Decapodians are bored and a complex system of internal organs, " most of which are either redundant or unnecessary.

In other words, as seen from an observer on the superior planet at opposition, the Earth appears at inferior conjunction with the Sun.

To a first approximation, from a large distance, the spacecraft appears to have bounced off the planet.

While observing the peaceful Ba ' ku people on their planet, Lieutenant Commander Data ( on secondment to the duck blind mission there ) appears to malfunction, revealing the hidden presence of the joint Federation and Son ' a task force to the Ba ' ku.

Amongst Smith's science fiction tales are stories set on Mars and the invented planet of Xiccarph.

* Sartorias-deles — An iron-age magical planet on which most of Sherwood Smith's stories take place.

Mormon leader and historian B. H. Roberts ( 1857 – 1933 ) interpreted Smith's statements to say that the solar system and its governing " planet " the sun, revolved around a star known as Kae-e-vanrash, which itself revolved with its own solar system around a star called Kli-flos-is-es or Hah-ko-kau-beam, which themselves revolve around Kolob, which he characterized as " the great centre of that part of the universe to which our planetary system belongs ".

* In L. Neil Smith's The Venus Belt ( 1980 ), part of an alternative history series, an unrestrained capitalist free enterprise culture makes a huge success of colonizing the asteroid belt and decides to blow up and smash to pieces the " utterly useless planet " Venus so as to create a new Asteroid Belt ( hence the book's name ).

13 issue of The Minor Planet Circulars / Minor Planets and Comets, published by The Minor Planet Center of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Mr. Smith's work was honored by the naming of minor planet 9891 Stephensmith.

* The genetically engineered and prosthetics-ready warriors of the planet Sauron in the CoDominium series of short stories and novels initiated by Jerry Pournelle and also written by guest authors.

Notable stories of this type include " Painwise ", in which a space explorer has been altered to be immune to pain but finds such an existence intolerable, and " A Momentary Taste of Being ", in which the true purpose of humanity, found on a distant planet, renders individual human life entirely pointless.

Almost as popular as stories about Mars are stories about Martians engaging in activity ( frequently invasions ) away from their home planet.

Authors soon began writing stories based on the new Mars ( frequently treating it as a desert planet ).

Clangers is a popular British stop-motion animated children's television series of short stories about a family of mouse-like creatures who live on, and in, a small blue planet ( quite similar to, but not intended to be, the Moon ).

The background of Mars shared by most of the stories, as a desert planet crisscrossed by giant canals built by an ancient civilization to bring water from the polar ice caps, is a common scenario in science fiction of the early-20th century.

The time frame for the published Culture stories is from roughly AD 1300 to AD 2970, with Earth being contacted around AD 2100, though the Culture had covertly visited the planet in the 1970s in The State of the Art.

In the comic book Storyteller, C-3PO is found partially destroyed and abandoned on a planet enslaved by the Vindar by Otalp and Remoh, two boys indigenous to the planet, whom he tells stories of Luke Skywalker's adventures.

Oa's history is not clear ; according to some stories, the Guardians originated on a planet called Maltus.

Adventure stories that stick to a single, well-described planet are sometimes called planetary romances ; some of these planets are not very realistic and are effectively fantasy worlds.

In some stories, a planet is mainly considered as an object in space: the interest of the fiction depends upon its astronomical characteristics, such as its mass, its geological composition, its atmosphere, how many moons it has and what size they are, how close it is to its sun ( or suns ) and how hot they are.

In other stories, a planet is considered as a world or setting.

* Nidor — A cloudy, oceanic planet in stories by Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett.

* Troas — An Earthlike planet featured in the stories " Sucker Bait " by Isaac Asimov and " Question and Answer " by Poul Anderson.

Skaro appears in the Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories The Mutant Phase and Davros ( where we learn that Skaro had two moons: Falkus and Omega Mysterium, names drawn from a chart of Skaro's solar system in a 1976 Marks and Spencer tie-in book-Falkus is there revealed to be an artificial planet created by the Daleks as a last refuge ), and was where the Emperor Dalek operated from in The Genocide Machine, and features prominently in the I, Davros spin-off series, looking at Davros's life and the events that led to him creating the Daleks.

Mesklin is the name of a fictional supergiant planet created by Hal Clement and used in a number of his hard science fiction stories.

The notion of Mesklin's odd configuration stemmed from the fact that there were science fiction stories that featured low-gravity planets and high-gravity planets, but of course no single planet could have both low and high gravity.

They were also the first stories set outside the solar system on a planet believed ( then ) to actually exist.

Equally, an interstellar refugee camp turned slum of dubious reputation called the Dipple provides the starting point for a number of planet stories, as the number of desperate young people seeking any escape from its poverty is high.

Their leathery remains previously having " been ascribed to a fictional " sandtrout " in Fremen folk stories ," Imperial Planetologist Pardot Kynes had discovered the Little Makers during his ecological investigations of the planet, deducing their existence before he actually found one.