Mass of Mars

I'm pretty sure that astrophysicists can figure out the masses of different celestial bodies.
Does any one know what the mass of mars is?
I'm wondering if there is a difference between the actual and theoretical masses.
I want to find out is if the water boiled off into space or if it is still there (ie ice caps and underground). I also wonder about Hellas Crater and those two tiny moons...

Lots of water still on the planet. Hellas is a bad place to look for water. look at the map on the JPL site.

This one?

The part about Hellas and the moons was, if there is mass missing could it be in the moons.
That an asteroid could hit just so and blast off giant land masses that are trapped by gravity and become moons

But first I want to find out if its possible to know if any mass is missing.

much like the flat earth theory....maybe theres a flat mars theory...the whole universe is flat. that would explain any missing mass.

i think the moons are captured asteroids. hellas pushed everything through the other side

Please. This question is for Geologist or Physicists....

I'm not the only one who wants to know where the water went:
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=31027

"Where did all the water go? There are two possibilities: it could have evaporated and been lost to space along with most of the atmosphere; or some of it could have been trapped in rocks underground where the increase in pressure and temperature could be sufficient to keep it liquid."

I googled "mars mass" and found the following website:

[link]

It listed the mass of Mars as 6.4185 kg x 10exp23 (that is ten raised to the 23 power).

I'm not sure if there is a way to determine if mass has been lost over time.

The mass of mars is determined using the orbits of its moons, and to a lesser degree the affect of mars on the orbit of other bodies, asteroids, even the earth and our moon. I doubt the loss of mass of water would be detectable by these means. Maybe if the mass were changing TODAY we could measure that accurately, byt measuring changes in the orbits of our various mars orbiters.

multiple tons of space dust and rocks rain down on Mars every year. Mars is getting more massive over time. Same with Earth and our moon.

r lewis,

So, if the earth was to suddenly lose all it's water the mass change would be imperceptable?
Is that right?

Yes, that's right Marklar. Its actually easy enough to calculate. The mass of the Earth is actually 6x10E24 kg (6 x ten to the power 24). If we assumed that the Earth was uniformly covered by an ocean 5km deep for the sake of argument then the volume of the ocean is the volume of the Earth+ocean minus the volume of the Earth. So the mean Earth radius is about 6370km and the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi (radius)cubed

(Mark, I mentioned before an equation editor would be real helpful! )

So the volume of the Earth+ocean is 4/3 pi (6375,000)cubed (cubic metres) which is 1.08525 x10E21 cubic metres. The volume of the Earth alone is 4/3 pi (6370,000) cubed which is 1.08269 x10E21 cubic metres. So the difference between these is the volume of the ocean which is 2.55 x10E18 cubic metres. At 1000kg per cubic metre thats a mass of ocean of 2.55 x10E21 kg or only 0.04% of the mass of the Earth.

So, even if there was a uniformly deep ocean 5km deep over the whole of the Earth and it all evaporated away, the mass of the Earth would only decrease by 0.04%! (and the real ocean is less than that!)

Homework question - repeat for Mars.

mars radius = 3375 km
v = 159411796875 km^2

mars + 'ocean'= 3380
v = 160121343893 km^2

difference = 70957018 km^2
But 1000kg wouldn't be the same on mars with different gravity.

7.09 x 10^11 kg 'weight' of mars 'oceans'

Mass doesn't change with different gravity. Weight does.

But????

1 ml = 1 cc = 1 gm standard water only applys on earth.

Right???

Mass is the amount of the object a 1kg cube on Earth is still a 1kg cube on Mars.

Whenever a mass is located within a gravitational field it experiences a Force. It is that force, due to gravity, that you call weight.

to find the weight on any planet use the formula
W=mg

Where W is weight in Newtons(N)
M Is the Mass in Kilograms (kg)
and G is the acceleration due to gravity at that place in metres per second (ms).

An Example is the weight of a person with a mass of 65.0kg on Earth.

W=mg
=65.0x9.80
=637 N

Hope this helps.

The only thing i forgot was that the acceleration due to gravity changes depending on the Altitude the person is at.
So if the same 65 kg person was on top of Mt Everest, 8.8km above sea level, the Formula remains the same but the weight of the person is now 635 N because the Accel of Gravity is now 9.77 ms.

to find the value of G (you can use this for mars) use the formula mg=G(Mexm/Re2)

m= Mass of the object in Kg
G= Universal gravitational constant
Me= Mass of Earth (use Mars Mass here)
Re= Radius of the Earth(use Mars Radius here)This must be squared.

the simplified version is g=G(Me/Re2)

The original question about detecting a loss of mass - the answer is that there is no way to do this. The current mass of Mars or any other body is determined from observing orbits etc. We can't see what the orbit used to be. And as people say the loss of water from Mars would amount to little % of the mass and have a very small effect.

Liquid water would have an almost equal density on Mars I think at lower gravity?

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