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Mars comes closer to Earth more than any other planet save Venus at its nearest—56 million km is the closest distance between Mars and Earth, whereas the closest Venus comes to Earth is 40 million km. Mars comes closest to Earth every other year, around the time of its opposition, when Earth is sweeping between the Sun and Mars. Extra-close ...
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] The gravitational potential difference and thus the delta-v needed to transfer between Mars and Earth is the second lowest for Earth ...
Seasons. Mars has an axial tilt of 25.19°, quite close to the value of 23.44° for Earth, and thus Mars has seasons of spring, summer, autumn, winter as Earth does. As on Earth, the southern and northern hemispheres have summer and winter at opposing times. However, the orbit of Mars has significantly greater eccentricity than that of Earth.
The "Mars problem" is a conflict between some simulations of the formation of the terrestrial planets which end with a 0.5–1.0 M E planet in its region, much larger than the actual mass of Mars: 0.107 M E, when begun with planetesimals distributed throughout the inner Solar System. Jupiter's grand tack resolves the Mars problem by limiting ...
Deimos (moon) Deimos / ˈdaɪməs / (systematic designation: Mars II) [11] is the smaller and outer of the two natural satellites of Mars, the other being Phobos. Deimos has a mean radius of 6.2 km (3.9 mi) and takes 30.3 hours to orbit Mars. [5] Deimos is 23,460 km (14,580 mi) from Mars, much farther than Mars's other moon, Phobos. [12]
Andreas Cellarius 's illustration of the Copernican system, from the Harmonia Macrocosmica. Heliocentrism[a] (also known as the heliocentric model) is a superseded astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the universe. Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth ...
The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. This revolution consisted of two phases; the first being extremely mathematical in nature and the ...
Elongation (astronomy) In astronomy, angular separation between the Sun and a planet, with the Earth as a reference point. This diagram shows various possible elongations (ε), each of which is the angular distance between a planet and the Sun from Earth's perspective. In astronomy, a planet's elongation is the angular separation between the ...