I came across a very beautiful book on the Apollo missions. In addition to the exquisite photographs, there was a table of start and retun dates etc. I used the middle dates for each mission in SkyMap to find the distance to Mars - only for Apollo 15 in 1971, July 26-Aug 07 it was close enough for a more accurate calculation. Mars was getting closer to opposition, and the Moon was approaching a conjunction with Mars (on Aug 7) during the mission. At the 2003 opposition Earth-Mars distance was 0.3728 AU At no other Apollo mission it was less than 0.5 AU On 1971 Jul.28 it was 0.3906, Aug.1 0.3836, Aug.5 0.3791, Aug.8 0.3768 Moon was 0.0024 AU closer to Mars at conjunction, which was not close enough for another record. From ISS, the minimum distance was 0.372756 AU On Aug.9 1971 the Moon-Mars distance was just 250000 km longer than the ISS-Mars distance at last opposition. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Björn Gimle" Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 10:03 PM Subject: [dsat] Re: record-breaking human achievement > It is not necessary, like in some replies, to use a program specifically > built for these computations, and/or providing 9+ digits accuracy for the > absolute distance. > > I don't have the data for Apollo missions, ... > ----- Original Message ----- > > > It occurs to me that tomorrow, August 27th, some human may have a > > chance to pass closer to Mars than anyone else in recorded history. > > This could be someone at or near the sub-Martian point or someone > > on ISS. > > According to a very quick calculation based on a recent elset, this > > last might occur at about 2003-08-27 1005 UT. Or possibly some > > astronaut on a previous mission, especially an Apollo mission. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 10 2004 - 06:17:32 EDT