Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Mars comes closer to Earth more than any other planet save Venus at its nearest—56 million km is the closest distance between Mars and Earth, whereas the closest Venus comes to Earth is 40 million km. Mars comes closest to Earth every other year, around the time of its opposition, when Earth is sweeping between the Sun and Mars. Extra-close ...
Phobos orbits so fast (with a period of just under one third of a sol) that it rises in the west and sets in the east, and does so twice per sol; Deimos on the other hand rises in the east and sets in the west, but orbits only a few hours slower than a Martian sol, so it spends about two and a half sols above the horizon at a time.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun.The surface of Mars is orange-red because it is covered in iron(III) oxide dust, giving it the nickname "the Red Planet". [22] [23] Mars is among the brightest objects in Earth's sky, and its high-contrast albedo features have made it a common subject for telescope viewing.
In gravitationally bound systems, the orbital speed of an astronomical body or object (e.g. planet, moon, artificial satellite, spacecraft, or star) is the speed at which it orbits around either the barycenter (the combined center of mass) or, if one body is much more massive than the other bodies of the system combined, its speed relative to the center of mass of the most massive body.
Several factors make placing a spacecraft into an areostationary orbit more difficult than a geostationary orbit. Since the areostationary orbit lies between Mars's two natural satellites, Phobos (semi-major axis: 9,376 km) and Deimos (semi-major axis: 23,463 km), any satellites in the orbit will suffer increased orbital station keeping costs due to unwanted orbital resonance effects.
Mars has two permanent polar ice caps, the northern one located at Planum Boreum and the southern one at Planum Australe. The difference between Mars's highest and lowest points is nearly 30 km (from the top of Olympus Mons at an altitude of 21.2 km to Badwater Crater [1] at the bottom of the Hellas impact basin at an altitude of 8.2 km below ...
The Mare Australe quadrangle is one of a series of 30 quadrangle maps of Mars used by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Research Program. The Mare Australe quadrangle is also referred to as MC-30 (Mars Chart-30). [1] The quadrangle covers all the area of Mars south of 65°, including the South polar ice cap, and its ...
By the 2nd millennium BCE they were familiar with the apparent retrograde motion of the planet, in which it appears to move in the opposite direction across the sky from its normal progression. [2] Mars was portrayed on the ceiling of the tomb of Seti I, on the Ramesseum ceiling, [3] and in the Senenmut star map. The last is the oldest known ...