The great Moon-Mars double moon hoax

By Michael Breckenridge

The email was specific and detailed. At first blush, the idea seemed exciting. Mars will appear almost as large as the Moon, it said. The only time in our lifetime, it said. Never again until the year 2287, it said. The email has created a clamor around the world as millions of people have forwarded it uncritically to friends and family.

Luke Skywalker gazes out at the hazy twin sunset on Tatooine. (Lucasfilm Ltd.)

Too bad the fabled “double moon” event is a work of fiction. A young man stands in a white tunic and tan dungarees looks into the distance, wishing for space travel as a pair of ghostly twin suns hang in the afternoon sky. This is the image of Luke Skywalker on Tatooine in a famous pose from the movie “Star Wars”. Was it also the inspiration for the twin moon hoax?

The email began in the summer of 2003 and the year has been updated for the past seven to give it the air of currency.

The original email said:

“Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August. It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles off earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons.

The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.

Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again.”

The truth is that on August 27, 2003, Earth and Mars really did come closer than they’d been in nearly 60,000 years. We were less than 35 million miles from Cydonia and the face on Mars.

“The last people to come so close to Mars were Neanderthals,” Deborah Byrd of EarthSky said. “Astronomy writers like me had a field day that year, talking about Mars at its closest. Was it a spectacular sight? Yes! It looked like a dot of flame in the night sky. But was Mars as big and bright as the moon, even at its closest in 2003? Never.”

At its largest, Mars is 1/60th the size of the full Moon in the night sky under the best conditions. If Mars ever did look as large as the Moon when viewed from Earth, it would mean its orbit had decayed and the red planet was falling into the sun. The closeness would cause the oceans to flow over the continents, a flood of Biblical proportions, ending most land-based life on Earth, and ripping away part of our atmosphere. It would not be a pleasant night of star-gazing.

For those with the longevity to stick around for the next time Mars will be as close to Earth as it was in 2003, the date to mark on the calendar is August 28, 2287. In the meantime, there will be many similar, though not as technically close, flybys of the red planet, so all is not lost to history. This year’s close encounter happened on January 27, and one happens about every two years, with varying degrees of closeness. The next soonest opportunity similar to 2003 will be on July 31, 2018.