Springfield, MO. – It’s an annual event for emailers and bloggers.  Each year, the KY3 StormTeam’s inbox (and likely many others) is bombarded by forwarded emails and messages with titles that scream “Mars will look as large as the Moon to the naked eye!” The messages include comments such as “Is this true?” and “When can I see this?”.

Web and email misinformation around this exaggerated event is so prevalent, in fact, that August 27 is now becoming known as “Mars Hoax Day” according to Discovery.com.  

Several examples of these hoax and misinformative emails are given at  the urban legend clarifying snopes.com as well.

The mass mixed message may have begun around stardate 2003.  If you remember, on August 27, 2003, Mars and Earth were the closest in recorded history with a mere distance of 56 million km, according to NASA.  This is fact.

In a web post in the summer of 2005, Nasa.gov wrote, “Here are the facts: Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter this year [2005] on October 30th at 0319 Universal Time. Distance: 69 million kilometers. To the unaided eye, Mars will look like a bright red star, a pinprick of light, certainly not as wide as the full Moon.”

That’s hardly a close encounter of the red planet kind.  But that’s a good thing, as Nasa points out, “if Mars did come close enough to rival the Moon, its gravity would alter Earth's orbit and raise terrible tides.”

Skypub.com (Sky and Telescope magazine) reports that “Back on August 23, 2003 (that's 2003 with a 3, folks), Mars had an especially favorable opposition, coming close enough to Earth to appear 25 arcseconds wide. That's still pretty tiny even in a telescope — smaller, for instance, than Jupiter always appears.

Back then, someone somewhere pointed out that at a magnification of 75× in a telescope, Mars would appear as big in the eyepiece (½° wide) as the Moon does unmagnified. True enough. But two things happened, as often do with chain letters. First, it got rewritten bit by bit to improve the story as people passed it around, so that the "75×" was downplayed or, in some versions, left out. Second, the chain letter kept going and going, with the same breathless excitement, long after August 2003 receded into the mists of history.”

The excitement in 2003 surrounded an event called opposition.  S.E.D.S., the Students for Exploration and Development of Space, explains Earth-Mars opposition as:

“Mars Oppositions occur when planet Earth, on its inner orbit, passes between the Sun and planet Mars. Because of the orbits of the two planets, this occurs about every 2 years and 2 months (26 months); the accurate average is the synodic period of 779.94 days. After that period of time, the Earth has moved around the sun exactly one time more than Mars, or 2.135311456 times, while Mars completed 1.135311456 revolutions, so that Earth and Mars are again in a line from the Sun. This line, however, is advanced at an angle of 48.71212423 degrees along the planetary orbits [with respect to] the previous opposition, i.e., in ecliptical longitude.”

Skypub.com explains, “In 2009, for instance, there's no opposition of Mars. Its next one will come on January 29, 2010, and even that will be a poor one, with Mars appearing no larger than 14 arcseconds wide.”

If you’d like to fact-check and forecast when Mars will be in opposition, use this handy link from SEDS).  But please don’t forward the Mars hoax email to your aunt, your cousins or post on your Facebook profile.  

However if you’d like to share THIS story, use our links above to share it with your friends as much as you’d like.