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It's prime time once again for e-mails that claim the planet Mars will loom as large as the full moon. Should you believe the claims? This year in particular, nothing could be farther from the truth.
The Great Mars Hoax tends to turn up every August, sparking questions like this one from Moe Rickett:
"I read recently that a planet will be orbiting the earth that hasn't been this close in over 2,500 years and would be very visible to the naked eye. Could you provide me a little insight as to which planet this will be and about what time of the year to expect a good view of this event? ... I seem to think it was to be in a very close orbit to earth and it would be the first time in thousands of years it has passed this close, and will not do so again for another several thousand years. Can you please help me with this information so my family and I can view this phenomenon?"
The bad news is that none of the planets is due to have a history-making close encounter this year (although it's a notable year for Neptune). The good news is that Mars and other planets such as Venus, Jupiter and Saturn are just as visible to the naked eye as they usually are.
Moe is most likely referring to the classic Mars Hoax claim, suggesting that the Red Planet will make the closest approach to Earth ever seen in recorded history. Some accounts say the approach will be so close that it will look as if there are two moons in the night sky on Aug. 27.
This is actually a garbled report referring to Mars' close encounter in 2003.
It's true that the planet came closer than ever before in human history on Aug. 27 of that year. But even then, Mars' disk was 75 times smaller than the moon's. That means the apparent size of the full moon as seen with the naked eye was roughly equal to Mars' size when seen through a telescope at 75x magnification. This graphic shows the true size comparison that existed seven years ago.
It will be a long time before Mars comes so close again. Aug. 29, 2287, to be exact.
This August, Mars is almost as far and as faint as it gets. The next relatively close encounter won't come until March 2012. But even now, the Red Planet can be seen with the naked eye if you look in western skies just after sunset. It's part of a celestial triangle also including Saturn and the bright planet Venus. Here's a graphic from the Jodrell Bank Observatory that puts the planetary trio in perspective.
If you have your heart set on seeing a Mars as big as the moon, check out this animation from the European Space Agency, based on time-lapse imagery captured by the Mars Express orbiter as it made a full orbital circuit. You can feast your eyes on thousands of closer views from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And for more on the Great Mars Hoax, review this report from 2008 (and 2006 ... and 2005).
Clarification for 8 p.m. ET: I've rewritten the passage about the moon (as seen with the naked eye) vs. Mars (as seen through a telescope). Martin Kuttner pointed out that what I had originally written could have been misread. Thanks for setting me straight, Martin!
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Leave a Comment:
there are some wonderful links in this report. Thanks Alan Boyle.
I can't wait to see all the 2012 comments this article will inevitably get.
The celestial triangle is great this year. I've never really taken notice of it until this summer, so it's great to finally be able to say "yup That's Saturn. Right there." with the naked eye. absolutely wonderful.
It's also mind blowing to me that this is the culmination of Neptune's first full orbit of the sun since it's discovery.
I can't believe this hoax is still going around...
We live in a country full of ignorant people, of course this hoax is still around... along with ghosts, vampires, conspiracy theories and any other idiotic thing that people want to believe in ;-)
I can. Look at the percentages of people who believe that President Obama is a Muslim (he is a Christian), that he is responsible for the bailout of Wall Street, GM and Chrysler (all were initially approved before he took the oath of office, and most money was dispensed before as well), and that President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance (this is just stupid on the face of it). Our media on both political sides is misleading the public, and the public is unwilling to seek or accept the truth. It's no wonder that this silly tale about Mars continues to live on.
--mark d.
I know, people are so gullible! But hey, I have a cousin in Nigeria that needs to get some money moved out quickly....
(just kidding!)
The say that about a few million years ago Mars got hit by a large meteor...Hit was such a large hit that the crust was split open as a result the core became cold and stopped spinning. That event caused Mars to lose it's own protective magnetic field, its own atmosphere and whatever life and water it had.
I propose that we remelt Mars core....How you ask? Let's take all our spent nuclear material, put it on deep ground penetrating rockets and let the combined heat of the spend nuclear fuel remelt the iron core of mars. If it's done right in a cou[ple of thousand years Mars could have it's own magnetic field again and the benefits that come with it.
...an interesting idea. Once we assemble all of the radioactive material in 1 place and put it on multiple rockets (assuming some terrorist group doesn't steal some while we're not looking)...what do we do if one of the rockets crashes during launch??
Even if this melting would work how do you purpose that we get the core spinning again to help create a magnetic field? Even at that the gravity of the planet is far too low and increasing its mass is going to create all kinds of orbital problem. Ultimately, it will probably be easier to find another Earth like planet around a distant star and get there instead of terraforming Mars to be another Earth.
"deep ground penetrating rockets", wow those must be something, are the nose cones packed full of gophers?
ROFLMAO!!!!
Thanks for the laugh!
Not to mention that the spent fuel isn't hot - after all, it is "spent".
And how much of this spent radioactive waste do we have relative to the size of Mars' core? I suppose you could use rockets filled with bricks to fill in the Grand Canyon, but no one could afford to fund such an inefficient scheme.
There are far better ways to terraform Mars than blasting nuclear waste at it.
Just because it's spent, don't be fooled that spent nuclear material produce no heat.
Besides all modern accepted ideas were considered crazy before they too became reality.
Just get the starship Enterprise to use it's phasers to jump start the planets core...
A planet can't be terraformed without a protective magnetic field.
Someone in our office sent word out that we would be experiencing the double moon because of Mars distance from the earth. I calculated how big Mars would have to be in order to be at least half the size of the moon. Taking into account the difference in distances the calculations show that for Mars to be half the size of the moon, Mars would have to be approximately 157,000 miles in diameter. That would be one big planet. Something that big would have a tremendous gravitational pull and affect our tide.
It is so damn hilarious (and maybe a little sad) to see this crap cycle back around every single year, and see everyone get all spun up about it again. (sigh...) I had someone come up to me last night and say, "Hey! I heard that Mars will be the closest it's ever been for 2000 years this month, and that we'll be able to look up and see all kind of things on it that you don't usually see!" I spent the next 15 minutes explaining the current positions of the planets, and that Mars is nowhere near "opposition", and that what she read is some garbled and recycled news from 7 years ago when Mars really was at one of it's closest approaches to Earth in millennia, and that you still need a powerful telescope to see ANY surface features on Mars (no matter at what point in its orbit it happens to be), and that back in 2003 is was a LITTLE easier to see more detail on the Martian surface through a powerful telescope because the planet was at a very close approach to Earth, making the apparent angular size of the planetary disk a little bit larger than usual, but that this month it is NOT in that position, and won't be that close again for almost 300 years. She says, "Are you sure about that? Because I read it was gonna be real big this month!" ARRRGH!!!! At the time, Mercury was also at greatest elongation, and the young crescent Moon was interloping amidst the planets, too... so I said to her, "OK, here's something that is pretty cool RIGHT NOW! Look...there's the Moon, and that bright one there is Venus, and right down there is Mars, and up there is Saturn, and right at the horizon is Mercury! Six solar system objects in one small field of view!" She was completely incredulous, and sneered, "How do you know that's Mercury? And what do you mean SIX?! I only see FIVE! Can't you count?!" I just smiled. "Have a good evening...".
Jupiter's equatorial diameter is approximately 22.4 Earths or 177,555 miles (roughly). Mars has a brightness surpassed only by Jupiter, Venus, the Moon, and the Sun. Mars has an average opposition distance of 78 million km (48.4692 million miles) but can come as close as 55.7 million km (34.61198 million miles) during a particularly close approach, such as the opposition of 2003. Mars is barely larger than Earth (.06 times bigger). If you could move Mars around willy nilly you'd have to put Mars slightly more than twice the distance to the moon in order for Mars to appear the same size as the Moon.
Wow, mob. We need to do some serious fact-checking. The equatorial RADIUS of Jupiter is 71492 km (x 2 = 142984 km diameter x 0.6214 km/mi = 88836 mi diameter). With the mean radius of Earth at 6371 km (x 2 = 12742 km diameter x 0.6214 km/mi = 7918 mi diameter), that's 11.2 Earth diameters for Jupiter. Appears you may have gotten your radii and diameters mixed up. Mars is most assuredly NOT barely larger than Earth. It is slightly more than HALF the diameter of Earth, and only a little more than one-tenth of the mass (about 15% of Earth's volume, but only 11% of Earth's mass -- slightly less dense than Earth). Mars would have to be 1.96 times the distance of the Moon from Earth in order for it to portend the same apparent angular size in the sky as the Moon. So slightly LESS than twice the distance, not slightly more.
I love this one, really brings a smile to my face.
By all means, let's CUT funding to science so we can all believe Mars and the Moon will be celestial twins (optically speaking) for a night.
It would be very cool if Mars were to appear in our skies as a twin moon; however this incident is astronomically impossible. I would love to know the origin of this fallacious manifistation. How can certain people be drawn into this cosmic hoax? I suppose that people are so fascinated with the red planet that they want to believe that finally an event will occur that will satisfy their curiosity. This is all about wishful thinking. It's just another part of human nature, and our quest for incidents that will never materialize. I do wish this phenomonon would take place, but as I said before it's not only astronomically impossible, but defies the physics of universal order.
that's Morrissey from 'The Smiths' isn't it?
Alan,
How big would Mars have to be to appear as big as the moon on it's closest approach to the Earth? I'm thinking way bigger than Jupiter.
AND... now with the news that the Moon is actually shrinking -- http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/articles/moon-may-still-be-contracting -- Mars will actually look BIGGER than the Moon does!