Perhaps you’ve noticed a ruddy, star-like beacon rising in the east at night. That’s the planet Mars and it has been steadily growing bigger and brighter over the past few months. Skywatchers everywhere are now watching the heavens with anticipation as the Red Planet heads for a close encounter with Earth this week. On November 30 @ 9 pm EST / December 1 @ 0200 UTC) it will reach its closest point to Earth, passing within 50.6 million miles 81.4 million km and offering backyard astronomers their best views of this mysterious world until the year 2033.
Mars makes a close pass by Earth every 2 years and while this planetary encounter is not the tightest (2003 opposition was only 35 million miles), our neighboring world is easy to spot even with the naked eye. It appears as a brilliant orange point of light in the eastern evening sky.
The Red Planet is easy to spot with the naked-eye and its amazing to think you can readily notice its distinct orange hue . Also cool to contemplate while watching Mars in our sky this week is that it is still at a respectable distance from us such that light from the planet takes 4.5 minutes to reach our eyes!
Don’t expect to see little green man or canals though. Mars watching requires patience and persistence but is well worth the effort. Since Mars rotates on its axis in just a little over 24 hours, it always shows off a different face.
The fourth rock from the sun, Mars is about half the size of our planet and has a third of our gravity. It is more than one and half times farther from the Sun than we are.
Like a rusty nail, the planet’s reddish-orange colour is caused by oxidized iron on its surface. Mars is also covered by fine dust, which is often whipped up into dust storms by 300 km/hr winds. With mountains three times higher than Everest, and canyons five times longer than our own Grand Canyon, Mars is an adventure traveller’s paradise.
Having an atmosphere, polar caps that change with seasons and twenty-four hour-long days, Mars is still most Earth-like amongst all the planets in the solar system. NASA rover missions in recent years have even established that Mars indeed has channels, not cut by Martians but by ancient rivers of water.
