Mars appears prefer it’s about to make a U-turn in the night sky – at the least, from Earth it appears that approach.
Since Dec. 7, 2024, the crimson planet has been making its westerly retrograde. However on Monday, that every one ends, in line with Space.com. Mars will seem to face nonetheless within the evening sky earlier than it makes its common eastward retrograde orbit via the photo voltaic system.
Retrograde is the backward motion relative to its regular course, in line with NASA. However this cosmic U-turn is from Earth’s perspective. Its cease and turnaround in its orbit is as a result of Earth is passing Mars at a sooner fee of pace.
On common, Mars goes into retrograde each 26 months, in line with BBC Science Focus.
Mars strikes at a slower pace than Earth, at a mean pace of 53,979 mph, in line with Cool Cosmos, an astronomy web site run by NASA and its frequent companion the California Institute of Know-how, or Caltech. In distinction, Earth strikes across the solar at 67,100 mph.
With one planet transferring sooner than the opposite, Mars’ brightness will descend from magnitude -1 to -0.3, with its measurement via a telescope additionally shrinking barely, House.com reported.
A celestial object’s stellar magnitude describes how vibrant that object appears within the evening sky, with the brightest stars being seen at a magnitude of 1, EarthSky reported. Objects with a damaging magnitude seem a lot brighter with out the necessity for a telescope, in line with NASA.
Regardless of its diminished brightness, Mars will nonetheless be seen within the evening sky, climate pending. And it’ll participate within the upcoming planetary parade on Feb. 28, co-starring with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus and Jupiter.
Mars, the fourth planet from the solar, is located between Earth and the asteroid belt. It has a radius of two,106 miles and is about half the scale of Earth, in line with NASA. Mars is 1.5 astronomical items away from the solar, with one astronomical unit being the space between the solar and Earth.
Throughout the inside photo voltaic system, Mars has essentially the most moons – however a far cry from Saturn’s 146, essentially the most of any planet within the photo voltaic system.
These moons, Phobos and Deimos, are believed to be both asteroids captured by Mars’ gravity or particles from the early formation of the photo voltaic system, in line with NASA. Phobos and Deimos, Greek for “concern” and “dread,” had been named by American astronomer Asaph Corridor in 1877. Corridor named them after the sons of Ares, the Roman god of conflict and the counterpart to the Greek god Mars.
