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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 ...
Speedy Phobos rises in the west, sets in the east, and rises again in just eleven hours, while Deimos, being only just outside synchronous orbit, rises as expected in the east but very slowly. Despite its 30-hour orbit, it takes 2.7 days to set in the west as it slowly falls behind the rotation of Mars.
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.
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 ...
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 is located closer to the asteroid belt, so it has an increased chance of being struck by materials from that source. Mars is more likely to be struck by short-period comets, i.e., those that lie within the orbit of Jupiter. [103] Martian craters can have a morphology that suggests the ground became wet after the meteor impact. [104]
Unlike Phobos, which orbits so fast that it rises in the west and sets in the east, Deimos rises in the east and sets in the west, slower than Mars's rotation speed. The Sun-synodic orbital period of Deimos of about 30.4 hours exceeds the Martian solar day (" sol ") of about 24.7 hours by such a small amount that 2.48 days (2.41 sols) elapse ...
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 ...