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Planet Earth sees Red: The Pioneer
New Delhi, Aug 28: The last time Mars came this close to Earth, our ancestors were living in caves and struggling to make basic tools out of rocks. A mere 60,000 years later, thousands of people around the world were using a vast array of high-tech digital and optical equipment on Wednesday to observe the red planet as it passes.
New Delhi, Aug 28: The last time Mars came this close to Earth, our ancestors were living in caves and struggling to make basic tools out of rocks. A mere 60,000 years later, thousands of people around the world were using a vast array of high-tech digital and optical equipment on Wednesday to observe the red planet as it passes.
From the shores of Tahiti in Polynesia to outback Australia and Japan, amateur and professional stargazers aimed their telescopes at the eastern sky for a close encounter with Mars.
At 5:51 am EDT, Mars passed just 34.65 million miles from Earth, making it the closest such encounter since the Stone Age.
Hundreds of stargazers queued up outside the Sydney Observatory as dark fell, eager to look through some of about 10 telescopes set up in the observatory's grounds.
"This is only once in a lifetime that I can see another planet... it's really great," stargazer Rebecca Horton told Reuters Television. Sydney's harbourside observatory was bathed in red light to celebrate the passing of the mysterious planet, clearly visible to the naked eye as a bright, twinkling dot.
"We wanted it a little bit bigger," a young schoolgirl named Victoria told local radio after watching Mars with her family from a Sydney beach.
The last time Mars came nearer was around September 12 in 57,617 BC when it passed about 34.62 million miles away. If you miss it this time you'll have to wait 284 years for another such close encounter.
The US-based Planetary Society has declared August 27 "Mars Day." Its website (http://planetary.org/marswatch2003) details global events from official viewings from observatories in Sydney and Beijing to desert star parties in places like Jordan.
Some of the best viewing will be in the southern hemisphere, especially from isolated tiny South Pacific islands like Tahiti, thought to be the closest point on Earth to Mars, and outback Australia, where a lack of pollution from city lights means the planet will shine bright red in the night sky. Australia's Siding Springs Observatory, about 250 miles northwest of Sydney, beamed images of Mars from its 24-inch telescope onto a large screen at the local Coonabarabran community hall. "We are going to have a link-up basically because if we had a lot of cars coming up here, car lights tend to give off a lot of light pollution so that will actually interfere with viewing so we would lose a lot of seeing," the observatory's Helen Goodyear told local radio.
But while Mars came the closest it has been to Earth since the Stone Age, man's long-held dream of landing on the planet remains as far away as ever. The red planet has always fired the human imagination.
Mars was the god of war in Roman mythology and the planet made good copy for early sci-fi fiction, such as Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. When Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds, HG Wells' story of a Martian invasion, many of his radio listeners were terror-stricken.
Fortune tellers, looking for clues in the sky to the future of an uncertain world, say that little good is likely to come from Wednesday's close encounter. Pointing to bloodshed and violence in Iraq and elsewhere in the West Asia, or to a rash of terror attacks, the latest of which killed more than 50 people in Mumbai in Monday, they predict disasters, both natural and man-made. "Violence will increase as people will be less patient and get angry quickly," Vineet Jain, a leading New Delhi-based astrologer, told Reuters.
Hope that life exists, or at least existed, on Mars still persists. Recent NASA probes have sent back images suggesting water once flowed on or near the Martian surface. Water is seen as a prerequisite for life on other planets. Monday, NASA selected the low-cost Phoenix probe to carry out the first so-called Scout mission to Mars. Phoenix is expected to land on Mars in late 2008.
At 5:51 am EDT, Mars passed just 34.65 million miles from Earth, making it the closest such encounter since the Stone Age.
Hundreds of stargazers queued up outside the Sydney Observatory as dark fell, eager to look through some of about 10 telescopes set up in the observatory's grounds.
"This is only once in a lifetime that I can see another planet... it's really great," stargazer Rebecca Horton told Reuters Television. Sydney's harbourside observatory was bathed in red light to celebrate the passing of the mysterious planet, clearly visible to the naked eye as a bright, twinkling dot.
"We wanted it a little bit bigger," a young schoolgirl named Victoria told local radio after watching Mars with her family from a Sydney beach.
The last time Mars came nearer was around September 12 in 57,617 BC when it passed about 34.62 million miles away. If you miss it this time you'll have to wait 284 years for another such close encounter.
The US-based Planetary Society has declared August 27 "Mars Day." Its website (http://planetary.org/marswatch2003) details global events from official viewings from observatories in Sydney and Beijing to desert star parties in places like Jordan.
Some of the best viewing will be in the southern hemisphere, especially from isolated tiny South Pacific islands like Tahiti, thought to be the closest point on Earth to Mars, and outback Australia, where a lack of pollution from city lights means the planet will shine bright red in the night sky. Australia's Siding Springs Observatory, about 250 miles northwest of Sydney, beamed images of Mars from its 24-inch telescope onto a large screen at the local Coonabarabran community hall. "We are going to have a link-up basically because if we had a lot of cars coming up here, car lights tend to give off a lot of light pollution so that will actually interfere with viewing so we would lose a lot of seeing," the observatory's Helen Goodyear told local radio.
But while Mars came the closest it has been to Earth since the Stone Age, man's long-held dream of landing on the planet remains as far away as ever. The red planet has always fired the human imagination.
Mars was the god of war in Roman mythology and the planet made good copy for early sci-fi fiction, such as Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. When Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds, HG Wells' story of a Martian invasion, many of his radio listeners were terror-stricken.
Fortune tellers, looking for clues in the sky to the future of an uncertain world, say that little good is likely to come from Wednesday's close encounter. Pointing to bloodshed and violence in Iraq and elsewhere in the West Asia, or to a rash of terror attacks, the latest of which killed more than 50 people in Mumbai in Monday, they predict disasters, both natural and man-made. "Violence will increase as people will be less patient and get angry quickly," Vineet Jain, a leading New Delhi-based astrologer, told Reuters.
Hope that life exists, or at least existed, on Mars still persists. Recent NASA probes have sent back images suggesting water once flowed on or near the Martian surface. Water is seen as a prerequisite for life on other planets. Monday, NASA selected the low-cost Phoenix probe to carry out the first so-called Scout mission to Mars. Phoenix is expected to land on Mars in late 2008.