“It’s really cool to be able to get this latest measurement – and so precisely,” said InSight’s principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL) in Southern California. The shift in a planet’s mass can cause it to accelerate a bit like an ice skater spinning with their arms stretched out, then pulling their arms in. But they have a few ideas, including ice accumulating on the polar caps or post-glacial rebound, where landmasses rise after being buried by ice. It’s a subtle acceleration, and scientists aren’t entirely sure of the cause. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Understanding the Acceleration Dust on its solar panels caused the lander to lose power in December of that year, but data recorded by InSight’s instruments is still leading to new science. NASA’s InSight lander captured this selfie on April 24, 2022, the 1,211th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
They found the planet’s rotation is accelerating by about 4 milliarcseconds per year² – corresponding to a shortening of the length of the Martian day by a fraction of a millisecond per year. To track the planet’s spin rate, the study’s authors relied on one of InSight’s instruments: a radio transponder and antennas collectively called the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, or RISE. The findings, detailed in a recent Nature paper, rely on data from NASA’s InSight Mars lander, which operated for four years before running out of power during its extended mission in December 2022. Scientists have made the most precise measurements ever of Mars’ rotation, for the first time detecting how the planet wobbles due to the “sloshing” of its molten metal core. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona.ĭata sent by the spacecraft before it retired last December has provided new details about how fast the planet rotates and how much it wobbles. This study offers unprecedented insights into the Martian core’s size and shape, providing vital information for understanding Mars’ internal structure. Using NASA’s InSight Mars lander, scientists have precisely measured Mars’ rotation, detecting a subtle acceleration and the planet’s wobble due to its molten core.
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