Oleg Zabluda's blog
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
 
Timekeeping on Mars.
Timekeeping on Mars.

The length of the average solar day on Mars is 24h 39m 35.244s. On Earth it's 24h 00m 00.002s. i.e. Mars day is 2.7% longer than Earth's. First problem is how to divide Mars days into Mars hours, Mars minutes and Mars seconds. Some people propose that Mars second is equal to Earth second and for Mars day to roll over at the 24h 39m 35s mark. That's just silly. Who cares about the stupid earthlings anyway. Clearly, the right thing to do is to have Mars second to be 1.0027 Earth seconds, and Mars day to be 24 Mars hours 00 Mars minutes 00 Mars seconds.

Then we come to the problem of splitting Mars year (which is equal to 668.6 Mars days) into Mars months (with usual leap years). Beyond the obvious decision to keep the Mars week equal to 7 Mars days, we are faced with either adding 10 more months (January, February, Bradbuary, ...) or making existing 12 months longer (6-10 weeks). This decision is arbitrary, and either way will do. Months can not be all the same length anyway, nor should they be, because Martian seasons (solstices and equinoxes) are very far from being of equal duration. If they fall onto the beginning of Mars months, it's a big bonus.

See examples of both proposals in the references below:

http://cmex.ihmc.us/data/MarsCalendar/index.html
http://planetary.org/explore/topics/mars/calendar.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars
http://planetary.org/explore/topics/mars/calendar.html

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