The Universe is in state of rebellion. First, with the extraterrestrials and now with Mars, which has scientists on high alert due to an increase in the speed of its spin.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reported that this phenomenon is causing the days on the Red Planet to be shorter.
Scientists have obtained precise measurements of Mars’ rotation which increases by about 4 milliseconds of arc every year, therefore detecting how it “wobbles due to the sloshing of its molted metal core” for the first time.
InSight Spacecraft Mission to Mars
All this, as a result of the InSight spacecraft mission, which collected data for four years on the planet before it ran out of power in December 2022.
The module was composed by a set of instruments, including antennas and a transponder called RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment), which allowed tracking the rotation of Mars during the first 900 days of the mission.
Although it is no longer operational, the information obtained, helped scientists learn secrets about the Red Planet and change the way they understand it.
“What we are looking for are variations of a few tens of centimeters over a Martian year (…) It takes a long time and a lot of data to accumulate before we can see these variations,” explained Sebastien Le Maistre, RISE principal investigator at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, in a statement.
Why Is Mars Spinning Faster?
So far there is not an accurate answer as to why Mars is spinning faster, but experts already have two theories.
The first one consists in the accumulation of ice at the Martian poles, while the second one mentions the rise of land bodies that were previously covered in ice. Therefore, this planets possible changes can be the reason why its spin increases in speed.
Rotación completa de Marte.#cosmos #marte #Ciencia #sistemasolar #galaxia #universo pic.twitter.com/B95oqjJTq6
— el Universo de Bruce (@Bruce84493380) August 13, 2023
More Secrets from Mars…
Thanks to the InSight mission, it was also confirmed that Mars has a molten metal core.
With RISE, the researchers measured the wobble of the planet as the core shakes inside, where they determined the size of the core, having a radius of about 1,835 kilometers.
“It’s really great to be able to get this latest measurement, and with such precision (…) I’ve been involved in the efforts to get a geophysical station like InSight on Mars for a long time, and results like this make all those decades of work worthwhile,” Bruce Banerdt, a retired researcher on the mission, stressed in a write-up.
This story was originally published in Spanish by Nayeli Párraga in Cultura Colectiva.
