Mars

PLANETTerrestrial planet

Kevin Gill from Los Angeles, CA, United States CC BY 2.0

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OVERVIEW

] PLANET

Mars is a terrestrial planet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 1.52371 . It has a mass of 0.11 and a mean radius of 0.53 · 3390 . It has been known since antiquity.

The red planet. Home to the tallest volcano and deepest canyon in the Solar System, and the most visited world beyond Earth.

WHAT IT IS: Terrestrial planet
HOW FAR: 1.524
HOW BIG: 0.53 · 3390
ONE ORBIT TAKES: 687

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THE MODEL

] CATALOGUED RADIUS

DRAG TO ORBIT

CALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · CATALOGUED RADIUS · DENSITY 3.93 G/CM³ FROM MASS AND RADIUS · RADIUS 3390 KM · LIT FROM WHERE THE SUN IS · TURNING ABOUT ITS OWN POLE

Drawn from the catalogued radius and from the same properties the picture at the top of this page uses, at the distance a flight to it would stop. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, at their real positions and drawn from where the camera actually is — so the constellations are wrong, and that is the point. This is the sky from there, not the sky from here.

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IMAGES

] 4 FRAMES

Kevin Gill from Los Angeles, CA, United States
CC BY 2.0
ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck
CC BY 2.0
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Public domain
NASA / USGS (see PIA04304 catalog page)
Public domain

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see Mars for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.

TONIGHT

Say where you are, and this line says when Mars is worth going out for.

WHERE IT IS NOW FLY TO MARS

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THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE

0.3′ ACROSS

Bright enough to pick out with your eyes alone, and from a lit street as well as a dark one. Today it is 4.98″ across. It stops being a point of light at about 12×, and at 48× it is a small round disc.

: 48×
: 1.08
: 1.25
: 13.0
: 4.98
LIT BY THE SUN: 92% of the face
SHOWS A DISC FROM: 12×
MAGNITUDE TODAY: 1.27 · within reach

Its largest moons swing out to 6.89″ for Phobos and 17.2″ for Deimos, at their widest. Every one of them gets further out than this equipment separates. How bright they are is another question, and one the catalogue does not answer: it publishes no magnitude for any moon.

Computed for 2026-08-27 from the centre of the Earth, and from the mean radius the catalogue holds. A distance changes daily, so this width is a fact about that date and not about the body.

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CATALOG DATA

] 12 FIELDS

The raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.

WHAT IT IS MADE OF

What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.

Mean temperature: −65
Rotation period: 24.62
Moons: 2

WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES

Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.

North pole (RA): 317.68143
North pole (Dec): 52.8865

THE ORBIT

The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.

Orbital period: 686.98
Eccentricity
Inclination: 1.85
Longitude of ascending node: 49.56
Longitude of perihelion: −23.94
Mean longitude: −4.55
Element epoch: 2451545.0000

[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 1 DESIGNATIONS

Common name Mars

[

CITE THIS PAGE

] DR1

This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.

PLAIN TEXT

SpaceCatalog. Mars [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/mars

BIBTEX

@misc{spacecatalog_mars,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{Mars}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/mars},
  note         = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from SpaceCatalog curated data.}
}

The values above were taken from SpaceCatalog curated data — CC-BY-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

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