Mars
The fourth planet from the Sun
Half Earth's width, the red planet owes its colour to iron oxide dust. Its thin air, almost all carbon dioxide, weighs less than 1 % of ours and the mean temperature is about -63 °C; yet riverbeds, deltas and lake sediments show that water once flowed across its surface.
Its day lasts barely 40 minutes longer than ours, and its year 687 days. Here you can orbit it and find Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the Solar System, the canyons of Valles Marineris, the Hellas basin, and the Gale and Jezero craters where the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers landed.
Key figures
- Diameter
- 6,779 km, 0.53 × Earth
- Mass
- 0.107 × Earth
- Surface gravity
- 3.71 m/s², 38% of Earth's
- Rotation period
- 24 h 37 min 22 s
- Sunrise to sunrise
- 24 h 39 min 35 s
- One orbit of the Sun
- 687 days
- Mean distance from the Sun
- 228 million km
- Mean temperature
- about -63 °C
- Surface pressure
- 0.6% of Earth's
- Atmosphere
- 95% carbon dioxide
- Moons
- Phobos and Deimos