Ok I know the earth is the closest to the moon but isn't venus next or mercury?

Answer 1

The nearest inner planet is Venus.. unless it is on the other side of the Sun and Mercury is on this side.. but their orbits order are...

Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars...

Answer 2

Our moon orbits the planet Earth, which orbits the Sun, just as the planets Mercury and Venus do. At different points in their own orbits, I suppose either one (Mercury or Venus) could be closer to Earth (and therefore closer to our moon) than the other, although they'd still be plenty far away.

Here's a little sentence to help you remember the order of the eight planets, going outward from the Sun: "Matilda Visits Every Monday, Just Stays Until Noon." That's Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Answer 3

Venus is the closer of the two planets to earth (around which the moon orbits) but the distance closet would depend on the orbital placement of the planets around the sun (mars could be closer than Venus quite often)

Answer 4

It depends on what time you are asking the question and even more, i.e. on where THEY are in their orbits relative to the Earth in its orbit, and on where Mars is in ITS orbit. How so? : because of (i) the relative sizes of the different planetary orbits, and (ii) the fact that all of the planets orbit the Sun in incommensurable times or Periods. (I'm assuming that your question implicitly invites us to ignore asteroids, and only consider major solar system objects of planetary masses or greater.)

The semi-major axes of planetary orbits are as follows, in A.U. (astronomical units, where 1 A.U. is the [average] distance of the Earth from the Sun). (I'm going to ignore detailed information on the eccentricities of the planets, although, to be really more exact and careful, one would need to consider whether Mercury and/or Mars were near their respective peri- or ap-helion distances from the Sun. Thus, in using just their semi-major axes in what follows, I'm only talking about the "average" Mercury and Mars distances from the Sun.)

Table: Planet and mean distance from Sun in A.U.

Mercury 0.39
Venus 0.72
Earth 1.00
Mars 1.52
Jupiter 5.20, etc.

(As we'll see, for this question, Jupiter etc. can in fact be ignored.)

When the Sun, Venus and the Earth are lined up, in that order, then Venus is certainly "next to the Earth/Moon" in the sense of being the next nearest reasonably large solar system body, ~ 0.28 A.U. away.

(To see how large a relative distance this is, the Moon itself is only ~ 0.0025 A.U. distant from the Earth! So it doesn't matter whether one is working out distances of things from the Earth, or from the Moon, since the difference between two such distances is itself negligible. I'll use "Earth" as a surrogate for "Earth and/or Moon" in what follows.)

If, however, Venus were on the other side of the Sun, in a Venus, Sun, Earth line-up (in that order), then it might not be Mercury, but rather Mars that might be nearest. For example, if Mercury were then between the Sun and the Earth, but Mars were on the other side, Mercury, at ~ 0.61 A.U. distant, would be the nearest planet. But if Mars were on the same side (a Sun, Mercury, Earth, Mars line-up, in that order) it would be only ~ 0.52 A.U. distant, that is, closer than Mercury.

If Mercury, Venus and Mars were on the other side of the Sun and Jupiter on the Earth's side of the Sun, the nearest large solar system body would be the Sun itself, and the nearest other planet would be Mercury, at ~ 1.39 A.U., on the other side. (Jupiter, then 4.2 A.U. distant, is way out of the picture, and more so at other times.)

Although the "line-ups" considered may seem unlikely, so-called "great line-ups" or "great conjunctions" of a substantial fraction of the planets have indeed happened during my own lifetime. Indeed, so many of the great planets were due to be aligned back in the late 1960s or early 1970s, that it led to a notorious book on its supposed consequences, "The Jupiter Effect." In that book it was claimed that this great line-up would create such strong tidal forces that the part of California west of the San Andreas fault could be ripped away and slide into the Pacific Ocean!

Needless to say, that great line-up passed without the slightest effect on earthquake activity, any tidal gravitational effect due to it being utterly negligible in comparison with the Moon's own varying monthly tidal forces, to which the earth has been subjected for a VERY long time!

Live long and prosper.

Answer 5

? Mercury and Venus are many many miles away. And they have no realtionship to out moon.

Answer 6

You need a remedial class in astronomy. They're both planets - one isn't the moon of the other.

Answer 7

asteroids