Mars Fever

Mercury, July/August 2003 Table of Contents

Courtesy of Lowell Observatory.

by William Sheehan

Astronomers obsessed with Mars would do just about anything to observe the Red Planet during the great oppositions of yesteryear.

Late this summer, the faster-moving Earth will catch up with and overtake Mars as the two planets pursue their perennial paths around the Sun. On August 27, 2003, Mars will come within 55,760,000 kilometers — slightly closer than it has been in about 60,000 years according to calculations by Jeff Beish of the Mars Section of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers and Jim DeYoung of the U.S. Naval Observatory. The last time Mars came this close to Earth, Neanderthals were producing flaked hand tools in Europe.

Close oppositions occur once every 15 or 17 years, whenever Earth and Mars line up when Mars is near its most sunward point, or perihelion. A collusion of factors, including slight changes over time in Mars’s orbital eccentricity, will make the coming opposition the most favorable in recorded human history (see "Why Mars Will Be So Close to Earth," page 28).

Perihelic oppositions have been landmark years of Martian studies. At the perihelic opposition of 1830, German astronomers Johann Mädler and Wilhelm Beer produced the first map of the planet. In 1862, astronomers William Rutter Dawes and Norman Lockyer made remarkably accurate sketches of the planet, and Heinrich d'Arrest of the Copenhagen Observatory mounted an unsuccessful search for Martian satellites.

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