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Mars Swings Unusually Close to Earth
amazon10x writes "Mars will come unusually close to the Earth on Saturday; the second time in 60,000 years. The last occurrence was in 2003. 'This is the best we're going to see Mars, so we should strike the iron while it is hot,' said Kelly Beatty, executive editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. The Red Planet will be 43.1 million miles from Earth at 11:25pm [Eastern time]." Update by J : Starting a few hours after sunset, look fairly high in the eastern sky.
"Unusual" can also mean "rare"-I think that's the context it's used in here.
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This time around it will be not so close to the horizon when it is visable, look to the west, it will be the brightest object in the sky.
There is truth in humor.
For those like me wondering the time zone, I actually RTFA:
On Saturday, Mars' orbit will bring it 43.1 million miles away from Earth, with its closest pass scheduled for 11:25 p.m. EDT.
main(){char *c;while(1){c=(char*)malloc(1);*c='a';fork();}
is so close, yet so far!
Jonathanjk.com
TFA says the timezone is Eastern Daylight Time (UTC - 0400).
So it is at 3:25 am UTC. I don't know where in the world Mars will be visible from at that time though.
Where I live it will be daylight, so I won't be able to see anything but the Sun as it burns into my retinas.
Planetary orbits are pretty stable (especially considering the short time frame), so it is fairly simple to calculate where Earth and Mars have been during the last 60,000 years.
EDT is 4 hours behind of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), ergo closest orbit will be at 03:25 a.m. UTC.
I think.
The information in the article in SI units:
> On Saturday, Mars' orbit will bring it 69.4 million kilometers away from Earth, with its closest pass scheduled for 3:25 p.m. UTC.
No true geek would use anything but UTC, wherever you are.
I am trolling
Mars feels it comes "unusually close to the Earth". Like in "Since a couple of years I feel irresistibly attracted to Earth." Or like suddenly Mars' orbit has changed.
Just bear in mind that 60k years is a fart in planetary history. This coming close to Earth could have -or has been- predicted hundreds of years ago.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
*sigh* The configuration that allows it get this close happens every 60,000 years. The cycle takes a few decade to play out.
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http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q2681.html
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We all went to school and we all know how this works. Let's just calm down and consider how rare or not rare this event is.
Earth orbits the sun in a nearly circular orbit at a mean distance of 1 astronomical unit (by definition of AU). Mars on the other hand orbits the sun in a less circular orbit that takes it as far as 1.67 and as close as 1.38 astronomical units from the sun. As we all know, it takes earth 1 year to orbit the sun (again, by definition of a year). It takes Mars 687 days (1.88 earth years).
Let's put this into more "human" terms using an analogy. Let's imagine a rock in the middle of a field. And let's put two people walking in circles around the rock. One person at a distance of 10 meters and the other at a distance that varies between 14 and 17 meters from the rock. Very quickly we'll notice that the closest the people can ever come from eachother is 4 meters and the furthest they can come is 27 meters. But we also notice that as they walk around, the person closer to the rock will take 1 minute to walk around the rock and the person on the outside will take 1.88 mintues so the one on the inside will be overtaking the one on the outside roughly every other minute (once per two years in Mars-Earth terms). And whenever they overtake, the distance will be anything from 4 to 7 meters. And quite often, it will be a distance of 4 to 5 meters or so. It's not rare at all. What's rare is that it would be VERY close to the minimum 4 meters.
So.. when we say it's "amazingly close" and "closer than in 60000 years", it's more like getting within 4.1 meters instead of 4.25 in the analogy above. We're not talking about 4 meters vs. 27 meters or anything like that.
Conclusion: this isn't THAT special at all. Mars isn't THAT much closer at all. For example for Mars missions and such, the difference in distance is mostly irrelevant.
Peppe
I don't know what speeds exactly rockets travel at, but at Mach 2 (earth relativistic since there's not air in space, but about 1200-1400MPH give or take depending on altitude)
Even a relative slow moving spacecraft travels far, far faster than the speed of sound. The average interstellar spacecraft generally cruises at somewhere around the neighborhood of 50,000 mph - roughly Mach 66. Some have been known to hit much higher speeds, but usually that's a result of a nearby planet's gravitational pull.
According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the fastest recorded spacecraft were the NASA-German Helios probes, which hit 158,000 mph during their slingshot pass around the sun.
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Exactly. And even more importantly for Mars missions and such is that the energy / velocity required to get to Mars varies hardly at all between the every couple of year distance of 49 million miles vs. this year's 43.1 million miles. It's easier to visualize if one understands that one doesn't fly in a straight line to Mars from Earth. That is, to fly from Earth to Mars today, you wouldn't travel 43.1 million miles just because that's the distance today. Rather, you'd travel something like 500 million miles cause you'd fly in a so called Hohman transfer orbit that essentially traces an elliptical orbit that has a periapsis (closest to sun) point that touches Earth's orbit and apoapsis (furthest from the sun point that touches Mars' orbit. The distance of the arc of that orbit between the periapsis and apoapsis is very roughly 500 million miles and varies VERY little depending on how close Mars was to Earth at launch time. And equally small is the variation in flight time and required fuel, thrust and delta velocity.
Peppe
And the worst thing about this whole thing is that it isn't true!
While in 2003 Mars passed us closer then at any other time in the last 60.000 years, it passes us by pretty close every 15 and 17 years. The 2003 passage was a "whopping" 1% closer to us than the 1971 pass, and this year's pass at 43 million miles is not unusual at all, every 15-17 years there's at least one pass that is significantly closer than that, the 1988 pass being at 37 million miles - noticably further than 2003, but much closer than this year's passage.
So as usual, take main stream press accounts of science stuff with a very big grain of salt!
Imagine an egg still in its shell. Looking down at the egg, it's like the shell is the orbit of Mars and the yolk (still inside the shell, of course) is the orbit of the Earth. In 2003, when the two planets got as close as they can get, it was like both were on the wide end of the egg, where the yolk is closest to the shell. Well, Mars' orbit takes about two years and two months to complete, so this year Mars and the Earth meet up near the wide end of the egg again. In two years' time, though, Mars will be a little further along the shell of the egg when it catches up to Earth, which will be a little further from the wide end of the egg.
In 60,000 years or so, the closest approach will have walked all the way around the edge of the egg until it's at the "closest closest approach," the wide end of the egg. There's nothing unusual about it.
Calling it UTC keeps the French happy and was instrumental in persuading them to accept it (there was a competing standard based on iirc Paris). Other than that I don't think there's any difference.
I am trolling
my free astronumy tip of the day: if it's dark look up
In addition, the article states that Earth and Mars are usually 140 million miles apart, as if they just stay stationary and only occasionally move closer. 140 million may be the average, but the separation is always changing. Seriously, this is why other countries laugh at the US, because even our science writers lack even a grade-school education in science.
When it's 11:25 PM wherever you are, that's the time to look.
Use as directed. Comment not valid in Canada or either of the two poles. Author not responsible for alien abductions due to stargazing.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, except it's not true. The pass 2 years ago was closest in 60,000 years, but this one's not unusually close at all. Mars is at opposition with Earth every 2 years, and every time there's all kinds of sloppy science reporting. When I read this on CNN yesterday, I just shook my head.
The reporting last time was ridiculous; some even stated that Mars would look as big as the moon; this again was sloppy misquoting; S&T had said that Mars IN A 75X TELESCOPE would appear as big as the Moon does TO THE NAKED EYE. Many news sources cut the emphasized parts in that statement.
I sometimes think AP puts people on the science desk if they can't make it anywhere else. They don't really seem to have an interest in accuracy, even though the science desk would seem to demand that qualification.
BTW, the view of Mars is actually better this time around than the "closest in 60,000 years" pass 2 years ago. The reason is that Mars is higher in the sky this time, so you have less atmosphere to look through. That's a far bigger difference than the measly amount closer it was last time.
The parent is simply wrong.
:-) ) that I haven't heard about, but I doubt the conflict the grandparent mentioned had anything to do with the GMT->UTC transition.
:-)
GMT and UTC are two very different time scales.
GMT is simply the mean solar time at Greenwich Observatory.
UTC is measured using atomic clocks, based on TAI (International Atomic Time) which is a weighted average of a few hundred atomic clocks around the world. Now, to keep it within one second of mean solar time at Greenwich Observatory, they occasionally add in a leap second here and there to make it work. The result being that UTC is offset an integral number of seconds from TAI.
The particular dispute with the French that I've heard of is that the French wanted to call UTC TUC (for Temps Universel Coordonné, or something like that) while others wanted to call it CUT (Coordinated Universal Time). So to ensure nobody got what they wanted, they agreed to call it UTC out of spite for one another.
Now, there may be another conflict with the French (the French are always making a fuss about something
Interesting, however, how the Proud French People values communications and interoperability with the Benelux, Germany and Italy more than being in a time zone corresponding to solar time at their latitude. They'd be a much closer match having the same time as the UK, Paris being just at about 2 E. Then again, the only thing the French like more than to be different than anyone else is to spite the English.