What Is the Surface Gravity of Mars?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Brian with ericksontutoring.blogspot.com. Today we are going to discuss Mars' surface gravity so in order to determine Mars' surface gravity we need to know the mass of Mars and we need to know its radius. We are going to use a simple equation and instead of giving specific numbers for the mass and the radius we are just going to compare it to Earth's mass and radius so let's take a look. The equation we are going to use is gravity or surface gravity in our case equals the mass divided by the radius squared. So the mass of mars is .11 that of Earth's and the radius of Mars compared to Earth is .53 so to find the gravity of Mars you put .11 and divide it by .53 squared which gives us .39. So that means that Mars has a surface gravity .39 of Earth's surface gravity but we still don't have an exact number yet. What we need to do is figure out or find what Earth's gravity is and then we can multiply by what we just found to find out Mars' surface gravity so let's do that. Earth has a surface gravity of 9.8 meters per second and we already found out that Mars has a surface gravity that is .39 of Earth's so if we multiply that we find out that Mars' surface gravity is 3.8 meters per second so that's our answer. Mars' surface gravity is 3.8 meters per second."