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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 ...
The zodiac constellations of Mars's ecliptic are almost the same as those of Earth — after all, the two ecliptic planes only have a mutual inclination of 1.85° — but on Mars, the Sun spends 6 days in the constellation Cetus, leaving and re-entering Pisces as it does so, making a total of 14 zodiacal constellations.
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.
Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE) is a radio science experiment onboard InSight Mars lander that will use the spacecraft communication system to provide precise measurements of Mars' rotation and wobble. RISE precisely tracks the location of the lander to measure how much Mars's axis wobbles as it orbits the Sun.
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 ...
An areosynchronous orbit that is equatorial (in the same plane as the equator of Mars), circular, and prograde (rotating about Mars's axis in the same direction as the planet's surface) is known as an areostationary orbit (AEO). To an observer on the surface of Mars, the position of a satellite in AEO would appear to be fixed in a constant ...
Scientists are unsure what is causing subtle speeding up of Red Planet’s rotation – but they have some ideas Length of a day on Mars is shrinking as planet is strangely spinning faster every ...
In astronomy, the rotation period or spin period [1] of a celestial object (e.g., star, planet, moon, asteroid) has two definitions. The first one corresponds to the sidereal rotation period (or sidereal day), i.e., the time that the object takes to complete a full rotation around its axis relative to the background stars (inertial space).