PARIS: August is proving an unforgettable month for amateur astronomers as they turn their gaze on Mars, now at its closest to Earth since Neanderthals walked our planet.

On the 27th of this month, the Red Planet will be 55.76 million kilometres from Earth, according to Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus, who says proximity of this kind last occurred nearly 60,000 years ago.

Like racing cars, the Earth — the third rock from the Sun — has the inside track over Mars, the fourth planet, as they orbit the Sun.

Earth takes a nippy 365 days to make a circuit, whereas Mars takes 687 Earth days because it is farther out.

This celestial ballet means Earth whizzes past Mars once every 26 months or so. However, the two planets take a slightly egg-shaped path around the Sun, and this factor mainly determines just how close the flyby will be.

In fact, the next time the two planets will be closer than in 2003 will be in the distant future — in 2287.

On August 27, Mars will shine red and orange, not of course as big as the Moon or anything near its size, but certainly as bright as Jupiter, the regal giant of our solar system, ever gets. Skygazers have been thirsting for the moment.

“The Red Planet will present a large enough disk for backyard astronomers with good-sized telescopes to discern some of the planet’s features, such as the polar ice cap, dark surface features and perhaps even storm clouds,” the specialist website space.com says.

Mars has always cast a spell on Earth, either as a divine body, a fictionalized source of invasion or as Earth’s verdant twin.

Dreamers see it as mankind’s first colony in space, a stepping stone to a wider conquest of the Solar System and, who knows, the galaxy beyond.

“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but we cannot live forever in a cradle,” the Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an early visionary of interplanetary travel, wrote in 1911.

No fewer than four new probes — two US, one European and one Japanese — are hurtling towards Mars, with their main goal to resolve the great enigma: does life, or the potential for it, exist on Earth’s neighbour?—AFP