The Mars tale that won't die

Recently I received an e-mail from my good friend Jim Anderson, asking if the information contained in an attached file had any validity. So I opened it up to take a look and immediately reacted with, "oh no, it's back!"

"It" was the Mars story that won't die. I'm very confident that many of you have also run across this item, or a similar version, at least once (maybe multiple times) over the past few years.

This latest story that Anderson forwarded on to me begins by announcing: "Check it out, guess no one will get much sleep in August-MARS." It then goes on to describe that on August 27, Earth and Mars will be closer together than the two planets have been in about 60,000 years. And Mars will appear as big as the full moon, meaning (stated in small print) that through a 75-power telescope Mars will look as big as the full moon does to the naked eye.

Is any of this starting to sound familiar yet? Funny thing, though. While the month and day of closest approach are clearly stated, nowhere in the entire announcement is the year mentioned. Folks, this is old news. On August 27 the two planets were very close (within about 34.7 million miles of each other), and the Mars/moon size comparison was real, but the year was 2003! It's over now. The event has past. A closer approach of the two worlds won't happen until the year 2287.

It's all a matter of celestial mechanics. Imagine two circles, a smaller one lying within a larger one. The small circle represents Earth's orbit, the large circle Mars' orbit. The sun is located at the center of both circles. In reality, however, the orbits of both planets are imperfect circles, or ellipses (Mars' being significantly more out-of-round than Earth's). Because of this fact, the distance between the ellipses is not the same everywhere along the two orbits.

Now, since the orbit of Mars is larger than Earth's, it takes the Red Planet longer to make one revolution around the sun. In fact, Mars travels about 2.2 times slower than Earth.

Suppose the sun, Earth and Mars are in a straight line, with the two planets on the same side of the sun. This configuration is called opposition. It will take 26 months until the two planets and sun are once again in the same sort of alignment. But since the distance between the two orbits varies, not all oppositions are created equal.

It just so happened that in August of 2003, this celestial lineup occurred where the distance between the orbits of Earth and Mars is near the minimum. And this region of closest separation between the two orbits does not remain fixed in space, but shifts position over time.

The next time Earth and Mars are lined up again will be in January of 2010, when the two planets will be separated by a relatively distant 61.7 million miles. For more information about close approaches of Mars, check out this NASA link: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/allabout/nightsky/nightsky03.html.

While the original article was written to genuinely inform the general populous about a rare celestial event, I believe these subsequent rehashes are deliberately intended to mislead prospective readers. Do not be fooled by this one again.

If anyone doesn't get much sleep come August, it will probably be because it's too blasted hot, not because Mars is getting ready to side-swipe us.