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Mars's average distance from the Sun is roughly 230 million km (143 million mi), and its orbital period is 687 (Earth) days. The solar day (or sol) on Mars is only slightly longer than an Earth day: 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. [185] A Martian year is equal to 1.8809 Earth years, or 1 year, 320 days, and 18.2 hours. [2]
Extra-close oppositions of Mars happen every 15 to 17 years, when we pass between Mars and the Sun around the time of its perihelion (closest point to the Sun in orbit). The minimum distance between Earth and Mars has been declining over the years, and in 2003 the minimum distance was 55.76 million km, nearer than any such encounter in almost ...
Mars Global Surveyor imaged the Earth and Moon on May 8, 2003, 13:00 UTC, very close to maximum angular elongation from the Sun and at a distance of 0.930 AU from Mars. The apparent magnitudes were given as −2.5 and +0.9. [8]
Like Pluto, its orbit is highly eccentric, with a perihelion of 38.2 AU (roughly Pluto's distance from the Sun) and an aphelion of 97.6 AU, and steeply inclined to the ecliptic plane at an angle of 44°. [220] Gonggong (33.8–101.2 AU) is a dwarf planet in a comparable orbit to Eris, except that it is in a 3:10 resonance with Neptune.
The Hungaria asteroids lie closer to the Sun than the 4:1 resonance, but are protected from disruption by their high inclination. [57] When the asteroid belt was first formed, the temperatures at a distance of 2.7 AU from the Sun formed a "snow line" below the freezing point of water. Planetesimals formed beyond this radius were able to ...
Mars just scored another point in favor of alien life.. Scientists discovered signs of an ocean's worth of liquid water miles below Mars' surface. The findings, based on Marsquake measurements by ...
Mars may be drenched beneath its surface, with enough water hiding in the cracks of underground rocks to form a global ocean, new research suggests. ... This water — believed to be seven miles ...
A proposal for such an area of replenishment is the Oort cloud, possibly a spherical swarm of comets extending beyond 50,000 AU from the Sun first hypothesised by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort in 1950. [34] The Oort cloud is thought to be the point of origin of long-period comets, which are those, like Hale–Bopp, with orbits lasting thousands of ...