Surface Gravity of Mars
| Value | 3.71 m/s² |
| Status | Measured: ± 0.01 m/s² (0.0027 relative) |
| Source | NASA planetary fact sheet (equatorial surface gravity) |
| Categories | AstronomicalPlanets |
| microgal | 371,000,000 μGal |
| milligal | 371,000 mGal |
| millimeter per second squared | 3,710 mm/s² |
| centimeter per second squared | 371 cm/s² |
| gal | 371 Gal |
| inch per second squared | 146.06299 in/s² |
| kilometer per hour per second | 13.356 km/h/s |
| foot per second squared | 12.171916 ft/s² |
| mile per hour per second | 8.2990336 mph/s |
| meter per second squared | 3.71 m/s² |
| standard gravity | 0.37831472 g |
Learning zone
Thirty-eight per cent of a g is the number that shapes Mars exploration. It is gentle enough that Ingenuity could fly a helicopter in an atmosphere less than one per cent as dense as Earth's, and it lets terrain features grow tall — Olympus Mons reaches 22 km partly because weak gravity and a stationary crust let a volcano pile up over hundreds of millions of years.
It is also the reason entry, descent and landing is so hard: the atmosphere is thick enough to require a heat shield but far too thin to stop a spacecraft, so every mission needs some combination of parachutes, retro-rockets and, for the heaviest rovers, a sky crane. What 3.71 m/s² does to human physiology over years is one of the open questions of crewed Mars planning — we have data on 1 g and on zero, and none in between.