According to NASA, Mars is spinning more quickly and the days are getting shorter.

 The study was carried out by scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA. What is driving this accelerated rotation of Mars is unknown.

The NASA InSight Lander's data analysis has shown that Mars' rotation rate is increasing. During its extended mission in December 2022, the lander worked for four years before running out of power. The results, which experts claim to be the most exact measurement of Mars' rotation ever, were just reported in a paper published in Nature. It was discovered that Mars' rotation on its axis is speeding up by roughly 4 milliarcseconds each year, which results in a slight shortening of the Martian day each year by a few hundredths of a millisecond.

The investigation was conducted by scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Although they do not know what is driving this accelerated rotation of the Red Planet, they do suggest some potential causes.

They claim that one of the causes may be the buildup of ice on the planet's polar caps. They claimed that a planet's mass can change and cause it to accelerate something like an ice skater spinning with their arms out and then pulling them in.

Having this most recent measurement and with such accuracy is pretty cool. The lead investigator of InSight, Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stated in a statement that was posted on the organization's website, "I've been involved in attempts to get a geophysical station like InSight onto Mars for a long time, and results like this make all those decades of labour worthwhile.

The Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, or RISE, a radio transponder aboard the lander and antennae, was used to gather the data.

Following the twin Viking landers in the 1970s and the Pathfinder in the 1990s, RISE is the most recent piece of equipment that Mars has sent to Earth. With the addition of the improvements, RISE is now able to collect data that is five times more accurate than that of the Viking landers.