Russia is so big that its land covers more space than the entire surface of the dwarf planet Pluto.

In 2015, a NASA spacecraft called New Horizons flew past Pluto to take its picture and measure it. A scientist named Alan Stern led the team that discovered Pluto is only about 2,376 kilometers (1,476 miles) wide. Using math, they found that Pluto’s total surface area is about 16.7 million square kilometers (6.44 million square miles).Russia is the largest country on Earth and covers about 17.1 million square kilometers (6.6 million square miles). This means Russia is bigger than Pluto by an amount of land roughly the size of California! Russia is so wide that it crosses 11 different time zones and takes up 11% of all the land on our planet.Pluto is part of a crowded area of space called the Kuiper Belt. Even though it is the king of that area, it is still much smaller than our own Moon. The Moon has a surface area of nearly 38 million square kilometers, which is more than double the size of Russia.Comparing a country to a planet helps us understand how small 'dwarf planets' really are. While Pluto is a giant ball of ice and rock floating in space, its total skin is smaller than the land owned by just one nation here on Earth. This shows just how massive Russia is and how tiny Pluto can be.