August 25, 2003
John Sullivan
Photo: This image of Mars was taken from the Hubble space telescope in 2001. During the month of August, Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years.
At 4:51 a.m. Aug. 27, an event will happen that hasn’t happened in almost 60,000 years and won’t happen again for another 200 years.
At that time, the planet Mars will be the closest it’s been to the Earth since the time animals long since extinct walked the face of this planet. The best calculations are that this happened on Sept. 12, 57617 B.C.
At that time in Earth’s history, Neanderthals ruled, but modern man had begun arriving on the scene.
The next time this alignment will happen: Aug. 28, 2287.
“There is no danger of Mars hitting the Earth,” said Dave Hostetter, with the Lafayette Natural History Museum and Planetarium.
“Absolutely no danger of that happening,” he added with a grin.
What is happening is an unusual alignment where the planets are catching up and passing each other at dizzying speeds and every-so-often come into this position.
Mars is usually about 60 million miles from the Earth at its closest passage. This time around, though, it will be a mere 34.9 million miles.
Hardly a stone’s throw in galactic distances, Hostetter said.
“Right now, Mars is a bright red star in the southeastern sky. It will look reddish orange in color,” Hostetter said. “If you are away from bright lights, it is visible to the naked eye.”
The Red Planet still will seem small: To the naked eye, Mars will have the apparent diameter of a penny seen from 500 feet away. Even though Mars is twice the size of the moon, it will be 145 times as distant.
With binoculars, or better yet, a telescope, observers can start to pick out details on the planet’s surface.
The planets pass so close this year because both orbit the sun in ways that are not perfectly circular. When Earth is in a more distant part of its orbit in relation to the sun, and Mars is in the part of its orbit that’s closest the sun, the two planets are closer to each other.
According to NASA, July was the best time to look at the Red Planet, as Martian dust storms are expected to obscure the view this month.
“For backyard observers, it is a good time,” Hostetter said. “But I don’t want people to think they will be able to see details as clearly as they would on the moon by looking at Mars.”
It is still too distant and with most backyard telescopes, the best an amateur observer can hope for is to see the polar ice cap on Mars.
“Still, it’s Mars,” he said. “And that always gets a lot of people’s attention.”
The Canals of Mars
An optical illusion that was first reported in 1894 by astronomer Percival Lowell at an observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. As telescopes improved and satellites began visiting the Red Planet, it was determined that the canals were in fact, optical illusions that Lowell saw and not the presence of water or life on the Earth’s celestial neighbor.
The Face on Mars
An image taken by a satellite in 1976 on the Viking space probe has been called The Face on Mars. NASA has repeatedly said it was a mesa on the planet that looked like a face because of a combination of light and shadow. Others have speculated that it is a giant face that has been carved into the surface of the planet, showing that a past civilization once thrived there. A satellite image released in 1998 by NASA shows the same site, but without the images of a face.
On the way
There are five spacecraft presently enroute to Mars, one of which is a British lander called the Beagle II in honor of the ship Charles Darwin sailed on.
The other vehicles are: One from Japan; One from the European Space Agency, which is carrying the Beagle II; and two from the United States. All five spacecraft will arrive in Martian space in December and January.
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