Olympus Mons Olympus Mons Olympus Mons (; Latin for Mount Olympus) is a very large shield volcano on the planet Mars. The volcano has a height of nearly 25 km (13.6 mi or 72,000 ft) as measured by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). Olympus Mons is about two and a half times Mount Everest's height above sea level. It is the largest volcano, the tallest planetary mountain, and the second tallest mountain in the Solar System compared to Rheasilvia on Vesta. It is the youngest of the large volcanoes on Mars, having formed during Mars's Hesperian Period. It had been known
Stability of the Solar System essentially the distance from sun to earth). These are now known as the Kirkwood gaps. Some asteroids were later discovered to orbit in these gaps, but their orbits are unstable and they will eventually break out of the resonance due to close encounters with a major planet. Another common form of resonance in the Solar System is spin–orbit resonance, where the period of spin (the time it takes the planet or moon to rotate once about its axis) has a simple numerical relationship with its orbital period. An example is our own Moon, which is in a 1:1 spin–orbit resonance