Mars As Big As The Moon On August 27: Keep Dreaming.

It’s not true this year, it wasn’t true when the hoax began circulating in 2003 and it will never be true in years to come. Our solar system’s moon and Mars will not appear to be the same size on Aug. 27, 2018. It would be the most spectacular thing ever if the memes littering your Facebook newsfeed had a grain of truth, but it’s just not in the cosmos.

Actually there is a grain of truth in the pervasive urban legend, albeit a tiny, space dust-sized fact.

Mars brushed exceptionally close to Earth last month, from around July 7, when the red orb bumped Jupiter as the brightest planet in the sky, through the July 27 opposition and on July 31, when it reached its closest point to Earth. Mars still appears redder and brighter in the sky, second only to Venus in brightness, and will remain so through early September.

But there’s no way in the heavens Mars and the moon would ever appear to be the same size. It’s totally illogical.

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Still, the claim is the in the top 10 most-searched-for subjects on the Earthsky.org site.

The bogus claims may come in an email, as well as on social media, sometimes as a suggestion of a “double moon” and sometimes including a doctored photo, the site said.

“Mars can never appear as large as a full moon as seen from Earth,” Earthsky.org wrote, smacking down the rumor. “As seen from Earth, in months when Mars does appear side by side with a full moon, Mars’ diameter appears, on average, about 1/140th the diameter of the full moon.

“In other words, you’d have to line up 140 planet Mars – side by side – to equal the moon’s diameter.”

An actual phenomenon such as that described in the memes could doom us, NASA said.

“Don’t be fooled by the Mars hoax,” NASA said on its website. “The message is that Mars will look as big as the Moon in our night sky. If that were true, we'd be in big trouble given the gravitational pulls on Earth, Mars, and our Moon!”

There you have it. Not everything has to be more and super-sized, bigger, better or faster. Just sit back and enjoy a look at Mars as long as it shines brightly.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech