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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 ...
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]
Did you know Mars is named after the Roman god of war?
[1] [2] The low eccentricity and comparatively small size of its orbit give Venus the least range in distance between perihelion and aphelion of the planets: 1.46 million km. The planet orbits the Sun once every 225 days [ 3 ] and travels 4.54 au (679,000,000 km; 422,000,000 mi) in doing so, [ 4 ] giving an average orbital speed of 35 km/s ...
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On January 5, 1965, 36 days after launch and 10,261,173 km (6,375,997 mi) from Earth, Mariner 4 reduced its rate of transmission of scientific data from 33 1/3 to 8 1/2 bits per second. This was the first autonomous action the spacecraft had taken since the midcourse maneuver.
The corresponding values for Earth are currently 23 h 56 m 4.0916 s and 24 h 00 m 00.002 s, respectively, which yields a conversion factor of 1.027 491 2517 Earth days/sol: thus, Mars's solar day is only about 2.75% longer than Earth's; approximately 73 sols pass for every 75 Earth days.
Using this result, he was able to more accurately determine the distance of the Earth from the Sun, based upon the relative size of the orbits of Mars and the Earth. [53] He noted that the edge of the disk of Mars appeared fuzzy because of its atmosphere, which limited the precision he could obtain for the planet's position. [54]