Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the seventh largest in the Solar System. A cold, dusty desert world with a thin atmosphere (mostly CO₂), the planet features extinct volcanoes, deep canyons, polar ice caps, and seasons. Mars has two small moons (Phobos and Deimos), a day just over 24 hours long, and a year lasting about 687 Earth days. It is a prime focus of robotic exploration and studies about past water and habitability.
Source: science.nasa.gov
APODs including "Mars"
Mars in the Loop
30/05/2025
This composite of images spaced a weather-permitting 5 to 9 days apart, from 2024 September 19 (top right) through 2025 May 18 (bottom left), faithfully traces ruddy-colored Mars as it makes a clockwise loop through the constellations Gemini and Cancer in planet Earth's night sky. You can connect the dots and dates with your cursor over the image, but be sure to check out this animation of the Red Planet's 2024/25 retrograde motion. Of course Mars didn't actually reverse the direction of its orbit. Instead, the apparent backwards motion with respect to the background stars is a reflection of the orbital motion of Earth itself. Retrograde motion can be seen each time Earth overtakes and laps planets orbiting farther from the Sun, the Earth moving more rapidly through its own relatively close-in orbit. In this case Mars' apparent eastward motion began to reverse around December 8, when it seemed to linger near open star cluster M44 in Cancer. After wandering back to the west, under Gemini's bright stars Castor and Pollux, Mars returned to pose near M44 by early May. At its brightest near opposition on 2025 January 16, Mars was a mere 96 million kilometers away.