Mars and Earth are like two cars on a racetrack as they journey around the Sun. Earth is on the inside track and travels faster than Mars, which is on the outside. When Earth laps Mars about every two years, it comes as close as 35 million miles (56 million km) or as far away as 63 million miles (101 million km) because of Mars’ highly elongated orbit.

Finding life on Mars would excite researchers for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it would just be interesting to know that life did (or does) exist elsewhere in the universe. Humans have been wondering about this question almost as long as we have been in existence. Finding evidence that suggests that we may not be alone, that Earth is not the only planet capable of sustaining life, would be an amazing revelation. As for scientists, many want to know how and why life was created on Earth.

Seasons are caused by the inclination of a planet's rotational axis relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun. Earth's axis is inclined 23.5 degrees. On the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere, Earth's north pole is tilted 23.5 degrees toward the sun, so the northern hemisphere receives more sunlight. Half a year later, on the first day of winter, Earth's north pole is tilted away from the sun, so the northern hemisphere receives less sunlight.

Essentially, an analemma is the pattern the sun makes in the sky if you plot its position at noon every day in the course of a year. If one had a sextant, a chronometer set to the time and date on the prime meridian, and an analemma chart, one could determine one's position with fairly good accuracy. The shape of the analemma is influenced by the magnitude and phasing of two factors: axial inclination and orbital eccentricity.

Orbiter now includes Duncan Sharpe's TransX MFD mode, which is a great tool for setting up interplanetary routes. You need to activate the TransX module in the Orbiter Launchpad dialog to use this. TransX is quite a complex navigation tool, so to understand the concept and options, make sure you read the TransX manual (in the Doc folder) carefully.

For two reasons, an Earth calendar will not work on Mars. First of all, a Martian sol is nearly forty minutes longer than an Earth day. This may not seem like much, but over the course of a month this difference accumulates to nearly an entire day. So if one tried to use an Earth calendar on Mars, the months that contain 31 days on Earth would generally have only 30 sols on Mars, and most of our 30-day months would be only 29 sols long on Mars.

The closest approach is only to within 0.1 astronomical units (about 15 million kilometers (10 million miles) or 40 times the Earth-Moon distance), and it only gets this close every few hundred years. Over the next year, Cruithne won't get any closer than 0.3 astronomical units, and at this point it will be almost directly beneath the Earth's South Pole (this is possible due to the asteroid's inclined orbit).

The Spiders From Mars were David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust's three-piece rock band from 1971 to mid 1973, however they were only officially known by this name following the album's release in June 1972. Bowie has said that the inspiration for the name came when he was writing the song "Ziggy Stardust". The band consisted of: quot;It was Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and somehow, along the lines, the Spiders got attached to David Bowie.

This is very unlikely. All US space missions are required to meet planetary protection standards, and these standards are particularly stringent for Mars. As a Mars lander with no life detection experiments, the Mars Polar Lander is categorized as a Category IV A mission. This requires that the spacecraft has to be assembled in a class 100,000 clean room, and that contamination control effectiveness must be monitored and demonstrated by periodic microbiological assays.

Mars is the code name for a project developing an XML-based representation of PDF documents. XML, Extensible Markup Language, is a cross-platform, extensible, and text-based standard for representing data of all kinds. PDF, Portable Document Format, is the global standard to reliably view, print, and share documentation over the web and with other people, regardless of a computer's operating system. PDF preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colors, and graphics of any source document.

The amount of time it takes to transmit a signal from Mars to Earth or from Earth to Mars using the High Gain Antenna varies according to the relative positions of Earth and Mars in their orbits around the sun. At the time of the July 4th landing, it took approximately 10 minutes to transmit a signal.

Texe Marrs, Pat Robertson and Jack T. Chick say that the Illuminati did. The Illuminati hasn't said. Brian Desborough is convinced that white Martians built the pyramids on Mars and then later conquered Earth. Richard C. Hoagland has written much on the face on Mars and an area called Cydonia [Monuments On Mars California: North Atlantic Books, 1996].

Composed by Dr Tom J. Chalko (Australia) who organized more than 50 public lectures for Michel Desmarquet, set up a web site for The Book and was asked by Michel to answer all emails addressed to him since 1995. Questions are taken from Michel lectures and from the correspondence. All answers have been discussed with and authorized by Michel.

My name is Christian Reis. I'm a Brazilian developer involved with ORBit-Python, Bugzilla, PyGTK, Stoq and occasionally some other free software projects. I started my MSc in 2000 and this survey is an important part of the research (which is why you should be nice and help out). I have something of a webpage, too.