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By Frank oin-Makik Patokni Special to the1 Rappahannock'News
To celebrate the planet Mars’ closest distance to Earth in the last 60,000 years, the Rappahannock league for Environmental Protect ion i RLE Pi will sponsor an astronomy evening on Sunday, Aug. 3 1 at the Washington Eire Hall at 8:30 p.m.
On Aug. 27 Mars will approach within 04,600.000 miles (145 times the distance of the Moon). The last time the two planets were so close, our ancestors were living in caves and struggling to survive the extreme conditions of the Ice Age.
The next time Earth and Mars will be as near again is 284 years from now.
Earth and Mars are like two runners going around at different speeds in the lanes of a racetrack. Mars is about one and a half times farther away from the Sun than Earth and makes a circuit around the Sun in 687 days, compared with Earth’s 365 days.
Roughly every 26 months, Earth overtakes Mars on the inside. When this happens, there is a close encounter between Earth and Mars and the two planets line up in space with the Sun.
If the orbits of Earth and Mars were circles, Mars would be the same distance from Earth each time this happens. But the orbits are actually ellipses (ovalshaped), with the Sun offset from the center.
Mars, more so than Earth, follows a very non-circular orbit, so its distance from the Sun varies by 26.5 million miles. This means that the distance between Earth and Mars can be anything between 35 million miles and
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