The Red Planet is back. On a clear night you can view Mars. It shines now as a bright reddish-orange star in the north-eastern sky at about 9:30 p.m. It can be easily identified, since it is the brightest object in the sky around that time.

 

Mars will be getting brighter and closer to Earth, until it reaches its closest distance to Earth on 29 October. Mars will be about 69 million km from the Earth.

 

On 7 November, Mars will reach a point in its orbit termed opposition. When at an opposition, Mars is situated opposite to the Sun in the sky, i.e., it rises in the eastern sky at sunset and remains visible throughout the night. The Earth then lies between Mars and the Sun.

 

 

 

Mars rotates about the Sun every 687 days, or nearly 23 months. The opposition of Mars occurs every 26 months, but not all oppositions are equally near. Sometimes the distance of Mars at opposition exceeds 100 million km, and under the most favourable conditions, the opposition distance is about 55 million km. At its farthest point from Earth, Mars is over 400 million km away.

 

Nearly 26 months ago, on Wednesday, 27 August, 2003, Mars made the closest approach to Earth in the last 60,000 years. On that day the Earth and Mars were only about 56 million km apart. (Only our ancestors who lived in the Stone Age enjoyed a slightly closer opposition of Mars!)

 

That distance is really very small compared to the immense cosmic distance scale; but a virtual non-stop trip by train over the shortest Earth-Mars distance would take over 100 years!

 

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the second closest planet to Earth; only Venus, the second planet, comes considerably closer to Earth than Mars, at distances of around 40 million km.

 

Mars is the planet most closely similar to our planet. The Martian surface can host primitive life forms.

 

Due to its red colour, varying brightness and strange path, Mars has been the most intriguing planet throughout history. The ancient Egyptians named it Hor Desher "The Red Horus". In Mesopotamia, Mars was the god of the netherworld. In the Greek and Roman mythologies Mars was the god of war.

 

Mars is a small world. Our planet (12,756km across), is nearly twice as large as Mars (6,800km across). Interestingly, the ratio in size between Mars and the Earth is similar to that between a ping pong ball and a baseball. The red colour of Mars is due to the presence of iron in its rocks and soil.

 

Since its launch into space in 1990, the legendary Hubble Space Telescope has made many incredible images of Mars.

 

Currently there are three spacecrafts orbiting Mars at a close range, and there are two automatic rovers roaming the surface of our amazing space neighbour as robotic geologists.

 

For more information and images, please visit the following links.

 

Hubble Space Telescope Images of Mars

 

Hubble's Closest View of Mars

The Two Faces of Mars

Hubble's Sharpest View of Mars

A Global Mars Map

 

Mars Fact Sheet

Mars

 

 

Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem

PSC, senior astronomy specialist

aymen.ibrahem@bibalex.org

Ext.: 1735

Mobile: 0102211832