NASA's InSight Detects Shorter Martian Days With Steadily Increasing Spin
June. The researchers, led by Sébastien Le Maistre from the Royal Observatory of Belgium, found that Mars’ days are shortening by a fraction of a millisecond every year as the planet’s rotation accelerates. The team used data collected by the lander’s Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, also known as RISE, during InSight’s first 900 Martian days to study the planet’s movement throughout time.
RISE offered insights into Mars’ rotation and wobble as scientists beamed radio signals from NASA’s Deep Space Network at the lander. RISE would then reflect those waves back to Earth, allowing scientists to precisely track the position of the lander and, subsequently, Mars’ movement. With this, Le Bastien and his team calculated that Mars’ rotation is seeing an annual increase in rotation of 4 milliarcseconds per year. For reference, one arcsecond is 0.
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