• Stovetop@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I guess it’s easy to forget just how much smaller Mars is until comparisons like this help put it in perspective.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 days ago

      mars’ surface area is approximately as big as earth’s land surface area, i.e. everything excluding oceans. since oceans cover a large part of earth’s surface, there’s that.

    • Komodo Rodeo@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I can’t readily recall the Earth’s actual sq. km surface area, and can’t remember ever having heard the figure for Mars. Time to drop into Wikipedia and take a gander, I think.

      EDIT: I’ll be damned, TIL that the Earth has an area of 510.06 10^6 km², but Mars’ is only 144.37 10^6 km², only about 1⁄3 the size (28.3%).

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        3 days ago

        The circumference is roughly 40,000 kilometers. The original definition for a meter was such that 10,000 kilometers was the distance from the equator to the poles (so a quarter of the circumference). They got the math slightly wrong and didn’t want to people to think the process was wrong so they didn’t correct it. I forget the actual circumference but that is close enough for very rough estimates.