2023-08-17 06:00:47
NASA’s Insight mission has discovered that Mars is spinning faster than before, but scientists don’t yet know why.
Insight, now retired (since December 2022), had the particular mission of following the rotation of Mars during the first 900 days of the mission which lasted 4 years in total.
“What we are looking for are variations that are only a few tens of centimeters during a Martian year“, said the study’s lead author, Sébastien Le Maistre, RISE Principal Investigator at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, in a press release. “It takes a long time and a lot of data to accumulate before you can even see these variations..”
Through analysis of data from Rise, an instrument in Insight, scientists were able to determine that the rotation of the planet is increasing by regarding 4 milliarcseconds per year. In other words, the length of a Martian day shortens by a fraction of a millisecond each year (knowing that a Martian day lasts regarding 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth).
A study published in Nature shows that the increased acceleration seems very small and might be due to “the accumulation of ice at the Martian poles or the elevation of landmasses following being covered in ice“. But this is only a hypothesis and the team will have to work for many more years to decipher the secrets of the red planet thanks to the thousands of data collected by the various missions in progress or past on Mars.
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