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Course: NASA > Unit 3
Lesson 2: Mars: Ancient observationsOrbital cycles
Length of Martian year
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made surprisingly accurate calculations of the position of Mars 20 years before the telescope was invented! In 1576, Brahe set up an observatory in Hven, an island near Copenhagen where he studied the stars for 20 years.
With a combination of his naked eyesight and large instruments, Brahe calculated the position of Mars over time to within four arcminutes. If you examine this data you will find that Mars returns to the same position in its orbit every 687 days. This timespan - a Martian year - is almost two Earth years.
The current known value of Mars’ orbital period: 686.98 Earth solar days
Length of Martian day
How would we go about determining the length of a full day on Mars?
Here is a hint: we need to be able to resolve surface features on Mars. That is, by seeing a surface feature at a given time and measuring how long it takes for the feature to appear in the same place again, we can measure how fast Mars rotates on its axis (a measure of a “day”). The ability to resolve surface features wasn’t possible until the invention of telescopes.
Although Galileo observed Mars with a telescope in 1609, Mars still appeared to be too tiny to resolve features due to the magnification power, which was around 20 times that of the human eye. He simply described it as a “spherical body illuminated by the Sun.” To him, Mars would have appeared to be about the same size as a pea held at a distance of 2.4 meters (8 feet). He wasn't able to resolve any surface features at that scale.
Advancements in telescope design resolved these problems by extending the lengths of telescopes to 15 - 20 feet by the middle of the 17th century.
The Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695) drew Mars using an advanced telescope of his own design. It was 23 feet long and magnified objects about a hundred times. With his telescope, Mars would have looked about as big as the Moon does with a naked eye, though with far less detail:
On November 1659, Huygens saw a prominent and irregularly shaped dark area on the surface of Mars. Over the course of the evening, he made note of observable changes in the position of that dark area, recognizable to modern observers as a visibly darker area on Mars known as Syrtis Major.
Huygens noticed that the spot returned to the same position at the same time the next day, and calculated that Mars has a 24-hour period of rotation. In 1666, Gian Domenico Cassini refined this estimate, measuring Mars’s rotational period as 24 hours 40 minutes, which is very close to the actual value known today:
Length of Martian solar day: 24h 39m 35.2s
Today, a Martian day is called a “sol.”
Want to join the conversation?
- Why is a Martian day called a sol?(50 votes)
- It's short for solar day, which distinguishes whether we're talking about a day as in 24 hours, or a day as it occurs on the terrestrial body we're discussing.(46 votes)
- Who founded Mars?(5 votes)
- Mars can actually be seen sometimes without a telescope at night, and this is why people think there is no record of one single person discovering Mars.(5 votes)
- So if a day on mars is called a “sol” then what is a year called?(4 votes)
- I believe a Martian year is called it's sidereal year, which is 686 Earth days.(3 votes)
- Is the term 'sol' applied to solar days on other planets?(4 votes)
- Can mars be a livin planet.?(2 votes)
- maybe because they found water from the ice but that could just be the little bit of liquid from the nitrogen in ice form and then melted by the sun but there could be some cell or germ basically a little life form of some sort frozen but Mars is believed to had rivers because of the places show like when a river dries up.(1 vote)
- When is mars closest to earth? Just wondering(2 votes)
- It's different every time, so you can't really say a specific date.(1 vote)
- i was reading the first Question and read the answer and is the water safe if you fall in it on mars ?(1 vote)
- Well, it's actually full of toxins that can kill you.(3 votes)
- It never rains on Mars because of the thin atmosphere and the lack of a magnetosphere but I heard that MARS have lost his magnetic capability because of the cooling down of it`s core(1 vote)
- Yeah, instead of having a full magnetic field, it just has spots of magnetism.(3 votes)
- It has the same day time but only takes 88 days to travel around the sun.(0 votes)
- Mercury travels around the sun in 88 days, not Mars.(14 votes)
- how many Martian hours are in a sol? Or did scientists not invent a martin hour?(2 votes)
- An hour is a measurement of time, and a sol is the amount of time it takes for a planet to complete a full rotation. Therefore, although days (sols) vary with planets, an hour is an hour no matter where you are. So Martian hours are just like Earth hours or any other planet's hours.(1 vote)