Mars is Spinning Faster and Faster - by briankoberlein
The rotational motion of Mars over time. Credit: IPGP/David Ducros
The team did this by using data from NASA’s InSight lander. Over its 4-year mission, InSight ran an experiment known as the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, or RISE. Basically, radio telescopes on Earth would beam a signal to RISE, which would bounce the signal back. The RISE signal was Doppler shifted due to the relative orbital motions of Earth and Mars and their rotations.
But Mars doesn’t have a large moon, and it isn’t geologically active. So why is it speeding up? One strong possibility is that the interior of Mars is sloshing around. The RISE data didn’t just measure the rotation rate of Mars, it also measured an effect known as nutation. This is a wobble of a planet’s axis over time and depends in part on the mass distribution of the planet.
It will take more observations to fully understand this process. But we now know that when humans settle on Mars, they will have to adjust their clocks from time to time, just as we do on Earth.
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