Mars is rotating more quickly than it used to, according to data that NASA’s InSight lander collected on the red planet.
The now-retired InSight was armed with a suite of instruments, including antennae and a radio transponder called RISE, or the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment. The instruments were used to track Mars’ rotation during the mission’s first 900 days on the planet. Astronomers determined that the planet’s spin is increasing by about 4 milliarcseconds per year², or shortening the length of a Martian day by a fraction of a millisecond per year.
These relayed signals helped researchers track small frequency changes caused by the Doppler shift, which is what causes sirens to change in pitch depending on their distance. The frequency changes correlated with the planet’s rotation. “What we’re looking for are variations that are just a few tens of centimeters over the course of a Martian year,” said lead study author Sebastien Le Maistre, RISE’s principal investigator at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, in a statement.
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