Mars Spectacular!
Originally Posted by fred96ws6
...And if Mars was to ever appear as big as the moon to the naked eye there would be major catastrophes on the Earth do to gravitational pull of the planets.
not really....according to Newton's law of universal gravitation, all objects attract each other with a force which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to their distance of separation.
mass of the Moon = 73,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms
mass of Mars = 641,910,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms
diameter of the Moon = 3480km
diameter of Mars = 6794km
average distance of the Moon from Earth = 384,403 km
minimum distance of Mars from Earth = 5,570,000 km
so:
on average, the Moon is 14.49 times closer to the Earth than Mars (when Mars is at its minimum distance from Earth)
the mass of Mars is only 8.72 times that of the Moon
Mars is twice the diameter of the Moon, so it would appear the same size while being much farther away.
so it is reasonable to expect that (to the naked eye), Mars could look as large as the moon and not cause any major catastrophes on Earth. sure, it might have some minor effects, but obviously nothing cataclysmic, or else we'd have heard about it already, back in 2003 when it happened.......
also, since Earth has a mass of 5,974,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg (9.3 times that of Mars), Earth's gravitational pull would have more of an effect on Mars than the other way around
