In case you hadn't heard, Earth and Mars are the closest they've been to each other in 59,619 years — a mere 55.8 million kilometers (34.6 million miles) apart. If you have a telescope or a pair of binoculars, you should be able to make out the rusty bright spot in the night sky with clarity that is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event (the next time Mars and Earth will be this close is in 2287 when the planets will actually be nearer each other than they are right now).
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From SCIENCE@NASA: If you feel the urge to look up at the sky this month, you might be feeling the pull of Jupiter. The giant planet is having a close encounter with Earth all month long. On May 6th, the date of closest approach, Jupiter will be 410 million miles…
May 4, 2006
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Reiterating something I briefly mentioned, this from SpaceWeather.com: MARS HOAX: A bogus email is going around the Internet. It claims that Mars will be historically close to Earth on August 27, 2006--so close that Mars will look as large as the full Moon. This is not true. Here are the…
August 7, 2006
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Around 4:00 p.m. CST this afternoon (20:00 Universal Time), Earth reaches perihelion. That means we achieve our perigee around the sun, or in layman's terms, the point in our planet's orbit around Sol at which we are closest to the star. Now, before any of you go apeshit and tell…
January 3, 2007
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