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Orbit of Mars. Mars has an orbit with a semimajor axis of 1.524 astronomical units (228 million km) (12.673 light minutes), and an eccentricity of 0.0934. [1][2] The planet orbits the Sun in 687 days [3] and travels 9.55 AU in doing so, [4] making the average orbital speed 24 km/s. The eccentricity is greater than that of every other planet ...
The solar day (or sol) on Mars is only slightly longer than an Earth day: 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. [185] A Martian year is equal to 1.8809 Earth years, or 1 year, 320 days, and 18.2 hours. [2] The gravitational potential difference and thus the delta-v needed to transfer between Mars and Earth is the second lowest for Earth ...
Additionally, astronomers have found 6 white dwarfs (stars that have exhausted all fusible hydrogen), 21 brown dwarfs, as well as 1 sub-brown dwarf, WISE 0855−0714 (possibly a rogue planet). The closest system is Alpha Centauri, with Proxima Centauri as the closest star in that system, at 4.2465 light-years from Earth.
On both Earth and Mars, these two precessions are in opposite directions, and therefore add, to make the precession cycle between the tropical and anomalistic years 21,000 years on Earth and 29,700 Martian years (55,900 Earth years) on Mars. As on Earth, the period of rotation of Mars (the length of its day) is slowing down.
The astronomical unit (symbol: au[1][2][3][4] or AU) is a unit of length defined to be exactly equal to 149,597,870,700 m. [5] Historically, the astronomical unit was conceived as the average Earth-Sun distance (the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion), before its modern redefinition in 2012. The astronomical unit is used primarily for ...
A light-minute is 60 light-seconds, and so the average distance between Earth and the Sun is 8.317 light-minutes. The average distance between Pluto and the Sun (34.72 AU [5]) is 4.81 light-hours. [6] Humanity's most distant artificial object, Voyager 1, has an interstellar velocity of 3.57 AU per year, [7] or 29.7 light-minutes per year. [8 ...
As each day is divided into 24 hours, the first hour of a day is ruled by the planet three places down in the Chaldean order from the planet ruling the first hour of the preceding day; [2] i.e. a day with its first hour ruled by the Sun ("Sunday") is followed by a day with its first hour ruled by the Moon ("Monday"), followed by Mars ("Tuesday ...
The same year, he succeeded in measuring the rotation period of the planet, giving it as approximately 24 hours. [28] He made a rough estimate of the diameter of Mars, guessing that it is about 60% of the size of the Earth, which compares well with the modern value of 53%. [30]