Mars is closest to Earth since 2003 today

Mars will be the closest to Earth in over 15 years today. The Red Planet will be at a distance of 35.8 million miles (57.6 million kilometers) from Earth today, making it visible in the sky till atleast 2:30PM IST today. This will be the closest Mars gets to Earth since 2003 and the next such event will occur in October 2020. By mid-August, Mars will become fainter as Mars and Earth travel farther away from each other in their orbits around the Sun. According to NASA, Mars’ brightness increases as it comes closer to our planet, making it visible in the sky. The minimum distance from the Earth to Mars is about 33.9 million miles (54.6 million kilometers). Factors like gravitational tugging by other planets and the fact that the both Earth and Mars have elliptical (egg-shaped) paths, with their orbits slightly tilted with respect to each other, means that not all close encounters between the two are equal. In 2003, Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years! It won't be that close again until the year 2287. Whenever the two planets have a close encounter, it becomes easier to spot the Red Planet in the skyline. It can sometimes be visible to the naked eye and at other times a telescope is needed to see the celestial phenomenon. This time around, Mars will be clearest from the Southern Hemisphere skyline, meaning that India might not be the best country to view it from. Thankfully, the scene is being live streamed from the Griffith Observatory and you can go watch it in the video embedded below. Be warned that if someone tells you or you read somewhere that Mars will look as big as the Moon in our night sky, you are being fooled. Nasa says that if that were to be true, we'd be in big trouble given the gravitational pulls on Earth, Mars, and our Moon!

from Latest Technology News https://ift.tt/2KcaxU3

Comments

Specs comparison: Honor Play 8A vs Honor 8X

The Honor 8A has been the talk of the town for quite a period of time. The phone was leaked on TENNA earlier then revealed on the Chinese website called Weibo. Finally, the smartphone got launched in China last week with a MediaTek chipset. On the other hand, the Honor 8X is another mid-range segment device by the company that is powered by a Kirin 710 octa-core processor. We are comparing these two smartphones to see which one will be the right choice in terms of specifications? The Honor Play 8A sports a 6.03-inch display that offers a resolution of 720 x 1560 pixels, while the Honor 8X features a slightly bigger 6.05-inch display that comes with a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels. The Honor Play 8A has a water-drop notch on top of it, which houses the front-facing camera, while the Honor 8X has a traditional notch. Coming to the processor, the Honor 8X is powered by a Kirin 710 octa-core processor, which is paired with 4GB RAM and 64GB internal memory. On the other hand, the Hono

First ever drone-delivered kidney is no worse for wear

Drone delivery really only seems practical for two things: take-out and organ transplants. Both are relatively light and also extremely time sensitive. Well, experiments in flying a kidney around Baltimore in a refrigerated box have yielded positive results — which also seems promising for getting your pad thai to you in good kit. The test flights were conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland there, led by surgeon Joseph Scalea. He has been frustrated in the past with the inflexibility of air delivery systems, and felt that drones represent an obvious solution to the last-mile problem. Scalea and his colleagues modified a DJI M600 drone to carry a refrigerated box payload, and also designed a wireless biosensor for monitoring the organ while in flight. After months of waiting, their study was assigned a kidney that was healthy enough for testing but not good enough for transplant. Once it landed in Baltimore, the team loaded it into the container and had it travel 14

My product launch wishlist for Instagram, Twitter, Uber and more

‘Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house, not a feature was stirring from the designer’s mouse . . . Not Twitter! Not Uber, Not Apple or Pinterest! On Facebook! On Snapchat! On Lyft or on Insta! . . . From the sidelines I ask you to flex your code’s might. Happy Xmas to all if you make these apps right. Instagram See More Like This – A button on feed posts that when tapped inserts a burst of similar posts before the timeline continues. Want to see more fashion, sunsets, selfies, food porn, pets, or Boomerangs? Instagram’s machine vision technology and metadata would gather them from people you follow and give you a dose. You shouldn’t have to work through search, hashtags, or the Explore page, nor permanently change your feed by following new accounts. Pinterest briefly had this feature (and should bring it back) but it’d work better on Insta. Web DMs – Instagram’s messaging feature has become the defacto place for sharing memes and trash talk about people’s photo

Search This Blog