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Despite its 30-hour orbit, it takes 2.7 days to set in the west as it slowly falls behind the rotation of Mars. Both moons are tidally locked, always presenting the same face towards Mars. Since Phobos orbits Mars faster than the planet itself rotates, tidal forces are slowly but steadily decreasing its orbital radius.
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 ...
Phobos is a small, irregularly shaped object with a mean radius of 11 km (7 mi). It orbits 6,000 km (3,700 mi) from the Martian surface, closer to its primary body than any other known natural satellite to a planet. It orbits Mars much faster than Mars rotates and completes an orbit in just 7 hours and 39 minutes.
Deimos (moon) Deimos / ˈdaɪməs / (systematic designation: Mars II) [11] is the smaller and outer of the two natural satellites of Mars, the other being Phobos. Deimos has a mean radius of 6.2 km (3.9 mi) and takes 30.3 hours to orbit Mars. [5] Deimos is 23,460 km (14,580 mi) from Mars, much farther than Mars's other moon, Phobos. [12]
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.
The Red Planet's spin is speeding up a hair fast enough to shorten the length of a Martian day by a fraction of a millisecond per year. NASA's Mars Insight lander died a few months ago, no longer ...
Mars spins a little more quickly each year, according to data collected by NASA’s now-retired InSight lander. ... The instruments were used to track Mars’ rotation during the mission’s first ...
Retrograde motion in astronomy is, in general, orbital or rotational motion of an object in the direction opposite the rotation of its primary, that is, the central object (right figure). It may also describe other motions such as precession or nutation of an object's rotational axis. Prograde or direct motion is more normal motion in the same ...