is mars the closest planet to earth?

Answer 1

Not generally. Venus is the planet whose orbit is closest to Earth's orbit.

But it is possible for Mars to be the nearest planet if Venus is on the other side of the Sun.

Answer 2

People who criticize the question are being overly obtuse. The implied question is, "Does Mars gets closer to Earth than any other planet?" This isn't a GRE English exam - it's the yahoo answer board for God's sake. Stop being morons.

Having said that, I believe the answer is that Venus gets closer at it's closest point. Best thing to do is Google or check Wikipedia - for a basic question like this, those sources should be fine.

And when you other people are reviewing Graduate Theses and Journal Articles, you can be as anal as you want. Here, you just look like pompous idiot a-holes.

Answer 3

No. At the present time Venus is closer.

There are times when Mars is closer than Venus, when Venus is on the other side of the Sun. There are times when Mercury is the closest planet.

Answer 4

Right now, VENUS is closer to Earth than Mars. Occasionally Mars is closer than Venus, but most of the time Venus is the closest planet to Earth

Answer 5

all the vast who-ha approximately Mars close recommendations-set is hogwash except you have an rather vast telescope. this is a particularly small planet and at its closest it continues to be difficult to make out any element on it with any telescope that maximum human beings ought to have the money for. additionally, planets are relatively difficult to image - you elect a rather long exposure and subsequently the motions interior the ambience will destroy the shot, to no longer point out which you particularly choose a competent famous individual force to maintain your telescope on course. in case you elect relatively good pictures of Mars bypass to the NASA internet site and do a seek. The pictures taken from the distinctive NASA probes are spectacular - canyons, mountains, dried river beds. no longer something you ought to do from Earth, regardless of the biggest telescopes could ever come close to to the view from the Mars probes. have confidence me - till now probes went to the planets, pictures of planets even from the biggest telescopes have been undesirable. So, how interior the call of the cosmos do you think of your exterior telescopes are going to be certain something startling of Mars, even at its nearest. Sorry to disappoint.

Answer 6

Mars is about 1.5 times as far from the Sun as is the Earth. Because
Earth and Mars take different periods of time to orbit the Sun (365.25
days for the Earth, and 686 days for Mars), the distance between Earth
and Mars varies. At their closest they are about 100 million km apart,
while at their most distant they are about 380 million km apart

Answer 7

The law someone was half-remembering above is the Titius-Bode Law proposed in 1766 which grew in credibility when Uranus was found in 1781 at 19.2 AU from the sun, where the law predicted a further planet would be at 19.6 AU, and this led to the hunt for the "Mussing Planet" between Mars and Jupiter that the Law predicted would be there at 2,8 AU from the sun, and after some years of hunting Ceres was discovered in 1801 at 2,77 AU, almost exactly where the Titius-Bode Law predicted.

I list below Sabi's table of planetary distances compared to the Titius-Bode predicted distances.

Planet T-B rule distance Real distance
Mercury 0.4 0.39
Venus 0.7 0.72
Earth 1.0 1.00
Mars 1.6 1.52
(Ceres) 2.8 2.77
Jupiter 5.2 5.20
Saturn 10.0 9.54
Uranus 19.6 19.2
Neptune 38.8 30.06

The Law failed to predict Neptune accurately and is not generally regarded as sound nowadays.

SO TO THE QUESTION:

I think the question is woolily phrased, Which planet is nearest to earth at any one moment will vary according to which is on the far side of the sun and which is on the near side of the sun at the arbitrary moment in time chosen,

It can be any of Mercury Venus and Mars, But none of the outer 4 planets ever gets near enough, As can be seen from the table above

Minimum Jupiter-Earth distance = 4.2 AU
Maximum Earth-Mercury distance = 1.39 AU

What matters (from the point of view of observation being facilitated and minimum distances for spacecraft to travel) I would argue is which planet at its closest approach to earth is the closer, of Mars and Venus,

And the answer is Venus because as has been said in other answers the closest Mars approached at perihelic opposition (on 27 August 2003) was 34.4 million miles (0.37 AU) and Venus is only 0.28 AU away on average at close approaches and 24.6 million miles away at its very closest (0.26 AU).

So it really is no contest (37:26 is almost a 3:2 ratio) and I can only think that the vast majority of the answers saying Mars reflects the widespread pernicious influence of the Mars Hoax letter which insinuates the idea that Mars is getting closer to earth and will soon "look as big as the Moon".

This is total nonsense but at one level, people must subconsciously believe it, as that it is the idea that pops up out of their subconscious mind when asked this question!

Answer 8

Sometimes. Unless you are talking about orbits. The planets are spread out in such a way that the inner planets are closer together than the outer ones. There's a law about that, starts with a k. Maybe Kepler's. Anyway, the orbit of Venus is closer to earth's than that of mars.

Answer 9

August of 2003 is a special time for scientists and amateur astronomers. Our red neighbor, Mars will move closer than it’s been in 50,000 years. On August 27, 2003, the “red planet” will be less than 55.76 million kilometers (34.65 million miles) away from the Earth. That sounds like a huge distance, but in stellar terms, that’s a stone’s throw. Just six months ago, Mars was about five times that distance.

"Think of Earth and Mars as two race cars going around a track," said Dr. Myles Standish, an astronomer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Earth is on a race track that is inside the track that Mars goes around, and neither track is perfectly circular.

There is one place where the two race tracks are closest together. When Earth and Mars are at that place simultaneously, it is an unusually close approach, referred to as a 'perihelic opposition'."

Answer 10

No, Venus approaches us as close as 26 million miles (41 million kilometres) every 19 months whereas Mars is closest at 35 million miles (56 million kilometres) every 15 years.