Tonight, Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been this year. This will not be like 2003 when we said, "Mars Closest To Earth in 50000 Years", or like those annoying hoax Mars Close to Earth emails that appear every year around July and August.
Mars and Earth have a "close encounter" about every 26 months. These periodic encounters are due to the differences in the two planets' orbits. Earth goes around the Sun twice as fast as Mars, lapping the Red Planet about every two years. Both planets have elliptical orbits, so their close encounters are not always at the same distance. In its close encounter with Earth in 2003, for example, Mars was about 20 million miles closer than it is in the 2007 closest approach, resulting in a much larger image of Mars as viewed from Earth in 2003.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this close-up of the red planet Mars when it was just 55 million miles – 88 million kilometers – away. This color image was assembled from a series of exposures taken within 36 hours of the Mars closest approach with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Mars will be closest to Earth on December 18, at 11:45 p.m. Universal Time (6:45 p.m. EST).
You can see the original image and accompanying press release here.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (Cornell University), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute, Boulder)
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