Shawn replies back

-----Original Message-----
From: Shawn Gordon [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 8:30 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: OT: Back to space?


At 08:22 AM 1/9/2004, Michael Berkowitz wrote:
>Shawn Gordon writes
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Shawn Gordon [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 7:56 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: OT: Back to space?
>
>
>My friend Dennis Powell is the one that wrote and broke this story, he
>actually told me about it back in September and the dates they had been
>considering for announcing it were the anniversary of Kittyhawk, the
>state
>of the union and the anniversary of the last shuttle disaster, but
there
>was also consideration about the new Mars probes and how successful
they
>were.  It has nothing to do with the election year.  Bush 41 also
wanted
>to
>do this.  Personally I love the idea.  Think about it, Mars is the only
>planet in the solar system where we can actually land and walk around,
>and
>it happens to be the closest as well, to me that is just exciting as
>hell.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
>------
>Actually Venus is almost twice as close (25.9 million miles) to Earth
as
>Mars (48.9 million miles) is.  However nobody's gonna be walking
arounds
>it's surface anytime soon.

Mars at it's closest is in the 30 million range
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Shawn is correct that Mars' orbit (variation of 26 million miles) is not
nearly as circular as Earth (3 million miles) or Venus (900,000 miles).
The numbers I gave were averages.  The actual number from last August as
reported at:

http://stardate.org/resources/news/mars2003/

August 27
At 4:51 a.m. CDT, Earth and Mars will pass 34,646,437 miles (55,758,006
km) from each other -- their closest approach in about 60,000 years.
(Many encounters have come within a few thousand miles of this distance,
though. In 1924, for example, Mars passed only about 13,000 miles
farther than this year.)

Mike Berkowitz
Guess? Inc.

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