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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.
Mars hosts many enormous extinct volcanoes (the tallest is Olympus Mons, 21.9 km or 13.6 mi tall) and one of the largest canyons in the Solar System (Valles Marineris, 4,000 km or 2,500 mi long). Geologically , the planet is fairly active with marsquakes trembling underneath the ground, dust devils sweeping across the landscape, and cirrus clouds .
This model is developed from 16 years of radio tracking data from Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), as well as the MOLA topography model and provides a global resolution of 115 km. [13] A separate free-air gravity anomaly map, Bouguer gravity anomaly map and a map of crustal thickness were produced ...
Mars is located 142,000,000 miles away from the Sun. Named after the Roman God of war, Mars is widely known for its blood-red color. Chinese astronomers even used to call Mars the 'fire star'.
The sixteen equatorial quadrangles are the smallest, with surface areas of 4,500,000 square kilometres (1,700,000 sq mi) each, while the twelve mid-latitude quadrangles each cover 4,900,000 square kilometres (1,900,000 sq mi). The two polar quadrangles are the largest, with surface areas of 6,800,000 square kilometres (2,600,000 sq mi) each.
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.
Size comparison between Phobos, Deimos and the Moon (right) Deimos is a gray-colored body. Like most bodies of its size, Deimos is highly non-spherical with triaxial dimensions of 16.1 km × 11.8 km × 10.2 km (10.0 mi × 7.3 mi × 6.3 mi), corresponding to a mean diameter of 12.5 km (7.8 mi) which makes it about 57% the size of Phobos. [7]
In the summer of 2008, the TEGA and WCL experiments on the 2007 Phoenix Mars lander found between 3–5wt% (percent by weight) calcite (CaCO 3) and an alkaline soil. [65] In 2010, analyses by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit identified outcrops rich in magnesium-iron carbonate (16–34 wt%) in the Columbia Hills of Gusev crater. The magnesium ...