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Deimos (moon) Deimos / ˈdaɪməs / (systematic designation: Mars II) [11] is the smaller and outer of the two natural satellites of Mars, the other being Phobos. Deimos has a mean radius of 6.2 km (3.9 mi) and takes 30.3 hours to orbit Mars. [5] Deimos is 23,460 km (14,580 mi) from Mars, much farther than Mars's other moon, Phobos. [12]
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 ...
The lowest energy transfer to Mars is a Hohmann transfer orbit, which would involve a roughly 9-month travel time from Earth to Mars, about 500 days (16 mo) [citation needed] at Mars to wait for the transfer window to Earth, and a travel time of about 9 months to return to Earth. [9] [10] This would be a 34-month trip.
It takes 250 days (0.68 years) in the transit to Mars, and in the case of a free-return style abort without the use of propulsion at Mars, 1.5 years to get back to Earth, at a total delta-v requirement of 3.34 km/s. Zubrin advocates a slightly faster transfer, that takes only 180 days to Mars, but 2 years back to Earth in case of an abort.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. The surface of Mars is orange-red because it is covered in iron (III) oxide dust, giving it the nickname " the Red Planet ". [22][23] Mars is among the brightest objects in Earth's sky, and its high-contrast albedo features have made it a common subject for telescope viewing.
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA 's New Frontiers program. [5] Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by Alan Stern, [6] the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study ...
Instead, a landing system that combines parachutes and sky crane was developed. Sky crane is a platform with eight engines that lowers the rover on three nylon tethers until the soft landing. EDL begins when the spacecraft reaches the top of the Martian atmosphere. Engineers have referred to the time it takes to land on Mars as the "seven ...
t. e. In astronomy, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, published by Johannes Kepler in 1609 (except the third law, and was fully published in 1619), describe the orbits of planets around the Sun. These laws replaced circular orbits and epicycles in the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus with elliptical orbits and explained how planetary ...