which planet is nearest to earth
Answers
Venus is nearest planet to Earth ..
What is the closest planet to Earth?
The answer most people would give is Venus. But … it might actually be Mercury.
Although Venus is the planet that comes closest to Earth as it sweeps by on its orbit, Mercury stays the closest to Earth the longest, according to a commentary published Tuesday (March 12) in the magazine Physics Today.
"By some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets," Tom Stockman, a Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama; Gabriel Monroe, a mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army's Engineer Research and Development Center; and Samuel Cordner, a mechanical engineer at NASA wrote in the commentary. [See Photos of Meteorites from Around the World]
When people calculate the distance between two planets, they usually subtract the two planets' average distances from the sun. But here's the thing: That only calculates the distance between two planets when they're closest to each other, they said. Some of the time, Venus is all the way on the opposite side of the Sun because the two planets move at different speeds.