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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 60,000 years (57,617 BC). The record minimum distance between Earth and Mars in 2729 will stand at 55.65 million km.
At their furthest Mars and Earth can be as far as 401 million km (249 million mi) apart. [191] Mars comes into opposition from Earth every 2.1 years. The planets come into opposition near Mars's perihelion in 2003, 2018 and 2035, with the 2020 and 2033 events being particularly close to perihelic opposition. [192] [193] [194]
Although possibly the first to make the mistake of describing the Martian year as lasting 687 Martian days, he was far from the last. [40] In the Robert A. Heinlein novel Red Planet (1949), humans living on Mars use a 24-month calendar, alternating between familiar Earth months and newly created months such as Ceres and Zeus. For example, Ceres ...
On both Earth and Mars, these two precessions are in opposite directions, and therefore add, to make the precession cycle between the tropical and anomalistic years 21,000 years on Earth and 29,700 Martian years (55,900 Earth years) on Mars. As on Earth, the period of rotation of Mars (the length of its day) is slowing down.
Deimos (/ ˈ d aɪ m ə s /; 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]
A Martian year is 1.8808 Earth years, so Mars makes eight orbits of the Sun in about the same time as Earth makes 15. Cycler trajectories between Earth and Mars occur in whole-number multiples of the synodic period between the two planets, which is about 2.135 Earth years. [ 3 ]
After traveling 293 million miles (471 million km) to reach Mars over the course of more than six months, Perseverance successfully landed on February 18, 2021. Its initial mission is set for at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days. It will search for signs of ancient life and explore the red planet's surface. [126] [127]
These observations were primarily made during the time intervals when the planet was located in opposition to the Sun, at which points Mars made its closest approaches to the Earth. Better telescopes developed early in the 19th century allowed permanent Martian albedo features to be mapped in detail. The first crude map of Mars was published in ...