SUMMARY: Each August an e-mail message begins making the rounds. "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN," it screams. What it is talking about is the prediction that on August 27 the planet Mars will swing by Earth at so close a distance it will appear as large as the moon in the nighttime sky.This rumor is not true, says Dr. Claire Bretherton of Britain's Royal Observatory Greenwich who says he hears this rumor a lot. Keith Cooper, editor of Astronomy Now magazine also hears this story every year. "I'm not sure how it started or who keeps propagating it. But it does seem to be prevalent," he says.
The e-mail hoax does have some basis in fact -- if we are talking about 2003. On August 27 of that year Mars did come much closer to Earth than normal, if you call 35 million miles close. The distance between the two planets varies because they have different orbits. The Earth orbits the sun in 365 days while it takes Mars 685 Earth days to make one orbit, and Mars' orbit is much more elliptical. As a result every 26 months there is a "close" encounter, and every 17 or so years a "really close" encounter.
Still, one thing about the hoax is clearly wrong. Mars will never appear as big as a full moon to the naked eye. If it ever would get that close to Earth, it would affect tides on our planet, just as does the moon, and could cause chaos. The original version of the e-mail said, "At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye." More recent versions usually leave out the part about needing a telescope. The truth is that on this August 27 Mars will be a long ways away, and NASA says Jupiter would make a more interesting planet to view.
To read the entire article click on this BBC NEWS link.
COMMENT: As the article points out, this rumor persists probably because of the fascination people have had in recent decades with the planet Mars. The panic caused by the 1938 radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds drama, when many people actually thought we were being invaded by Martians, shows how interested we are in outer space in general and Mars in particular. And it also shows how easily we can be misled. More recently, the "face on Mars" story also misled quite a few people before more detailed photos of this Martian hill showed it was not a carving of a face.
Still a hoax is a hoax, even though in this case circulators of the e-mail Mars hoax might be more guilty of not doing their homework than of trying to spread a blatant lie. Regardless, it is a warning that we should carefully evaluated stories of this kind. If a story sounds too strange to be true, it probably is.
Both evolutionists and creationists have been guilty of spreading stories that fell short of the truth. The Piltdown man, Nebraska man and the peppered moths are infamous Darwinian hoaxes. But some creationists, at least some religious lay people, have also spread myths such as the claim NASA computers have documented Joshua's long day or that the moon landings were faked.
Fortunately, we have a source of knowledge that we are certain will never lead us astray. Even the accounts in the Bible of events that may be hard to believe, such as the miracles, we know to be true because they were given to us by the only One incapable of error, our Holy God and Creator. Believe what God tells us in His Holy Word. Believe Him when He says our dead and decayed bodies will one day be resurrected, with believers in Jesus looking forward to eternal life in heaven and unbelievers having to face eternal death. St. Peter assures us: "We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty." (2 Peter 1:16 NIV)
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QUESTION OF THE DAY
What trick did moviemakers use when they filmed Moses parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments? They filmed water pouring into a tank. Then they ran the footage backwards.
Source: Discover (June, 2009)
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