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The Mars time of noon is 12:00 which is in Earth time 12 hours and 20 minutes after midnight. For the Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rover (MER), Phoenix, and Mars Science Laboratory missions, the operations teams have worked on "Mars time", with a work schedule synchronized to the local time at the landing site on Mars, rather than the ...
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.
Substituting the mass of Mars for M and the Martian sidereal day for T and solving for the semimajor axis yields a synchronous orbit radius of 20,428 km (12,693 mi) above the surface of the Mars equator. [3] [4] [5] Subtracting Mars's radius gives an orbital altitude of 17,032 km (10,583 mi). Two stable longitudes exist - 17.92°W and 167.83°E.
Kepler's 3rd law of planetary motion states, the square of the periodic time is proportional to the cube of the mean distance, [4] or a 3 ∝ P 2 , {\displaystyle {a^{3}}\propto {P^{2}},} where a is the semi-major axis or mean distance, and P is the orbital period as above.
Mars has an axial tilt of 25.19°, quite close to the value of 23.44° for Earth, and thus Mars has seasons of spring, summer, autumn, winter as Earth does. As on Earth, the southern and northern hemispheres have summer and winter at opposing times. However, the orbit of Mars has significantly greater eccentricity than that of Earth. Therefore ...
For planet Earth, which can be approximated as an oblate spheroid with radii 6 378.1 km and 6 356.8 km, the mean radius is = (( ) ) / = . The equatorial and polar radii of a planet are often denoted r e {\displaystyle r_{e}} and r p {\displaystyle r_{p}} , respectively.
At the bottom of the mantle lies a basal liquid silicate layer approximately 150–180 km thick. [44] [54] Mars's iron and nickel core is completely molten, with no solid inner core. [55] [56] It is around half of Mars's radius, approximately 1650–1675 km, and is enriched in light elements such as sulfur, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. [57] [58]
A satellite in areosynchronous orbit does not necessarily maintain a fixed position in the sky as seen by an observer on the surface of Mars; however, such a satellite will return to the same apparent position every Martian day. The orbital altitude required to maintain an areosynchronous orbit is approximately 17,000 kilometres (11,000 mi).