But during those two months, it's not Mars that's doing something different — it's Earth. It takes Earth days to orbit the sun. Mars needs Earth days to make a complete circuit. We're both in motion, but Mars has farther to go to make it all the way around.
Every 26 months, Earth catches up to Mars and moves past it. As our orbital path carries us past the Red Planet, we experience the illusion that Mars is pulling away from us, rather than the reality — that Earth is moving away from Mars. After a couple of months of this, our perception of how our planets are moving hits the reset button, and Mars appears to resume its forward movement.
And if that isn't weird enough, because Earth and Mars have different tilts to their orbital paths , the shape of the path tracking Mars' backward motion can change between retrograde events. While we're passing by the red planet this year, it will look to us as though Mars is moving up and down.
Then, as we move farther along our curved orbit and see the planet from a different angle, the illusion will disappear and we will once again see Mars move in a straight line. This apparent erratic movement is called "retrograde motion. Just to make things a little more odd, the orbits that Earth and Mars follow don't quite lie in the same plane. It's as if the two planets were on separate tracks that are a little tilted with respect to each other.
After Aug. Having spent more than half of this year trailing and ultimately catching up to Mars like race cars "hot lapping" each other , Earth will eventually leave Mars far behind. The rapid increase in brightness for Mars we're seeing now will be reversed and, consequently, during the latter part of this year, will fade rapidly.
Editor's note: If you capture an awesome view of Mars and want to share it Space. Original article on Space. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community space. Joe Rao is Space.
He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications. The apparent backward motion will manifest itself after Mars arrives at its first stationary point on Nov.
Mars will then begin to loop back toward the west. Earth will overtake Mars on Christmas Eve. Finally, on Jan. From then on, Mars will loop back to the east, resuming its normal eastward path among the stars.
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