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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. The eccentricity is greater than that of every other planet except Mercury ...
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.
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.
Mars spins a little more quickly each year, ... The instruments were used to track Mars’ rotation during the mission’s first 900 days on the planet.
It is classified as a terrestrial planet and is the second smallest of the Solar System 's planets with a diameter of 6,779 km (4,212 mi). In terms of orbital motion, a Martian solar day (sol) is equal to 24.6 hours, and a Martian solar year is equal to 1.88 Earth years (687 Earth days).
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 ...
A geostationary orbit, also referred to as a geosynchronous equatorial orbit[a] (GEO), is a circular geosynchronous orbit 35,786 km (22,236 mi) in altitude above Earth's equator, 42,164 km (26,199 mi) in radius from Earth's center, and following the direction of Earth's rotation. An object in such an orbit has an orbital period equal to Earth's ...
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).