Do the orbits of Earth Venus and Mars ever cross paths?

Question

I have an old atlas book that shows the orbits of the planets. The paths seem to come very close together at one point.. how close do the orbits come together?

Answer 1

Must be exaggerated. The orbits NEVER come close to each other. At the closest they are still separated by over 40 million miles.

Answer 2

The orbits of the 4 inner planets show as close together in any diagram that even attempts to show the outer planets to anything near to scale . The actual seperations are easy to find on the net but 30 million miles is approximately the value for closest encounters between each of the others and Earth which is in the middle.
Don't worry collision is impossible.

Answer 3

That atlas is not to scale. The orbits of those 3 planets never get closer than 20 or 30 million miles from each other.

Answer 4

Those diagrams never never show the true scale of the Solar System. Those three planets never come closer than tens of millions of kilometers.

Pluto was the only planet that "crossed" another orbit. It sometimes comes inside Neptune's orbit. But even then, the crossing never brings them into each other's path.

Of course, Pluto is not now considered a planet, and its wildly eccentric orbit is one of the major reasons it is not now considered a planet.

Answer 5

No, the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars never intersect. If they did, you'd know about it by now. What probably happened was that the artist scaled down the planets' orbits so they would all fit on the same page, but didn't scale down the sizes of the planets themselves by the same ratio. If he or she had represented the planets to the same scale as their orbits, you would barely be able to see them on the page (if at all) because the planets would be so tiny. On the other hand, if you draw the planets on a scale that can be seen, and scale the orbits up by the same amount, you wouldn't be able to see but one planet at a time.

In reality, Venus can't get closer to the earth than about 0.28 AU (about 42 million kilometers) and Mars can't get closer than about 0.50 AU (about 75 million kilometers). We're quite safe.

Answer 6

The reason they look close together on the diagram is perspective. Because the diagram is seen from slightly edge-on, rather than from above, the orbits seem closer on the "other side" of the diagram.

If you have a dinner plate with 2 concentric circles (or even if you just draw concentric circles on a piece of paper and then look at it from almost side-on), you'll see the same effect.

Answer 7

Wow, that must be old.
What, is it from the 1600's?

August of 2003 Mars was closer than it’s been in 50,000 years. On August 27, 2003, the "red planet" was 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 before, Mars was about five times that distance.

Answer 8

Nope these three will never cross orbits. Pluto (no longer a planet) is the only one to cross another, it crossed Neptune's.

Answer 9

if the sun was an orange, mercury would already be a mile away. the earth a few miles further. the ywill NEVER get close to eachother.

heres a scale model.
http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/

you need to scroll right to find the planets. every dot on your screen here, represents a thousant kilometers (about 600 miles)

Answer 10

No they will never cross paths but the closest you would get to it would be when they line up one behind the other... which is called a "conjunction"

but even at the closest point they will still be millions of miles apart.