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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 ...
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.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. The surface of Mars is orange-red because it is covered in iron (III) oxide dust, giving it the nickname " the Red Planet ". [22][23] Mars is among the brightest objects in Earth's sky, and its high-contrast albedo features have made it a common subject for telescope viewing.
Mars may be around 140 million miles away from Earth, but the red planet is influencing our oceans, according to new research. ... to look back tens of millions of years into Earth’s past, in a ...
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 ...
Areography, also known as the geography of Mars, is a subfield of planetary science that entails the delineation and characterization of regions on Mars. [1][2][3] Areography is mainly focused on what is called physical geography on Earth; that is the distribution of physical features across Mars and their cartographic representations.
Mars is a rocky planet, like Earth, that formed around the same time, yet with only half the diameter of Earth, and a thin atmosphere; it has a cold and desert-like surface. [ 10 ] One way the surface of Mars has been categorized, is by thirty " quadrangles ", with each quadrangle named for a prominent physiographic feature within that quadrangle.
In many aspects, Mars is the most Earth-like of all the other planets in the Solar System. [citation needed] It is thought [4] that Mars had a more Earth-like environment early in its geological history, with a thicker atmosphere and abundant water that was lost over the course of hundreds of millions of years through atmospheric escape. Given ...