Mars is spinning faster and faster, with the length of its days decreasing incrementally every year.
This finding was discovered using data from the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, or RISE instrument, on's InSight Mars lander, which measured the rotation of Mars precisely, as well as detecting how the planet wobbles in its spin because of its molten metal core"sloshing" around.
Over the past few centuries, the Earth's rotation has actually been slowing down ever so slightly, although 2020 saw 28 of the shortest days since records began in the 1960s. The Earth completed a rotation 1.47 milliseconds shy of 24 hours on July 19, 2020, and on July 26, spun 1.50 milliseconds faster than 24 hours. The shortest-ever recorded day occurred on June 29, 2022, when a full rotation was completed in 1.59 milliseconds under 24 hours.
"What we're looking for are variations that are just a few tens of centimeters over the course of a Martian year," the paper's lead author and RISE's principal investigator, Sebastien Le Maistre of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, said in the statement."It takes a very long time and a lot of data to accumulate before we can even see these variations.
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