Mars School Project: Help required please!!

[Fairy_Queen]

Hello!! I am a new poster to this forum, so hi! i hope you are all doing o.k!!

I have been set a task for a competition between different schools, and the topic mars!! I have to create a calendar on the months and days of mars and correlate them to earths!

now if anyone has any information on how long a mars day, week, month, and all that jazz please post it!!

OR

anyone who has an idea about how to lay this out!! Thanks guys!!

Rachel!!
xxx
:D :P

[harlequin]

Is it me, or does it look like someone is asking us to do their homework for them?

[Swift]

Welcome on board.
You might want to check out this NASA site, its sort of a Mars clock.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/

Good general info site on Mars
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/mars.html

[mike alexander]

Dear Fairy Queen: (and welcome to this board)

Use your noodle and try a google. Just a couple of hints:

How long is a martian year in earth days? In MARTIAN days? (are earth and martian days the same length?)

Why do we have months in our earth calendar? Does it make sense to have them in a martian calendar?

You only need a few basic pieces of data, which you can pry out of the Net in a million places. Then use your calculator (or spreadsheet) and have some fun, e.g., how old are you in martian years?

[daver]

You can get fairly complicated with this one.

We had a thread not too long ago about Mars time vs Earth time--there are a couple of possibilities--either have Mars time units (hours, minutes, seconds) be the same length as the earth time units and have an odd number of time units in a day, or adjust the length of the Mars units so they come out even (in which case a Mars second won't be the same length as the Earth second). There are arguments in favor of either approach. Another possibility is to try to resurrect the old French decimalized clock and calendar, but adapted for Martian time. I don't recall if the French concocted new names for their new intervals or not--if they did, you might be able to mangle them into Martian names. Or you could name the time units after, say, names concocted for the old Battlestar Gallactica TV series.

Once you figure out the number of Mars days in a Mars year, you might try to work out a calendar. Most likely there won't be an even number of days--you might want to figure out a leap year system. Isaac Asimov wrote an essay quite a while back on a revised earth calendar--he proposed tossing out months altogether and having a calendar consisting of 4 Seasons--each Season would have 91 days (conveniently a multiple of 7) with 1.25 special days a year. These special days wouldn't have a weekday associated with them--Saturday, the 91st of Winter would be followed by New Years Day which would be followed by Sunday the 1st of Spring. Every four years or so, Saturday the 91st of Summer would be followed by Leap Day which would be followed by Sunday the 1st of Fall. The advantage of this calendar is that you need only one--the 35th will always be on a Saturday, regardless of whether it's Spring, Summer, Fall, or WInter.

You might see if you can work out something similar with the Martian year.

If you want to get really tricky, you can look up the equation of time, and try to work out Martian Daylight Savings Time.

[Fairy_Queen]

Thank you for all your help!!

Well, actually it was my chemistry teacher who gave me a print out of this forum and i said i would sign up and ask you!! He said "great!" hee!!

:D

Cool...we're famous other places besides Godlike.

[Nanoda]

Check out what Swift has there. If you want to know incredibly technical stuff about time on Mars, check out the subsection here (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/help/notes.html), perhaps reading this primer here (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/intro/allison_02/) first. You'll note that both Michael Allison and Robert Schmunk are involved in both; apparently they literally wrote the book on Mars time.

The primer I mention above should be all you need, but for those just browsing, I'll type a bit more. I was messing with Javascript, making a clock for PST conversion (as it got annoying hearing the NASA TV announcer list times in PST only). The most interesting thing I found in my research is that lander time is determined by the solar time at the exact location they land at. At the time they land, the preceeding midnight is declared to be zero time, and that day is "Sol 1" for that mission.

[Fairy_Queen]

Check out what Swift has there. If you want to know incredibly technical stuff about time on Mars, check out the subsection here (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/help/notes.html), perhaps reading this primer here (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/intro/allison_02/) first. You'll note that both Michael Allison and Robert Schmunk are involved in both; apparently they literally wrote the book on Mars time.

The primer I mention above should be all you need, but for those just browsing, I'll type a bit more. I was messing with Javascript, making a clock for PST conversion (as it got annoying hearing the NASA TV announcer list times in PST only). The most interesting thing I found in my research is that lander time is determined by the solar time at the exact location they land at. At the time they land, the preceeding midnight is declared to be zero time, and that day is "Sol 1" for that mission.

Thank you Nonando (hope that is spelt right!) you are all giving me lots of good help and advice!!

All i have to do now is find out the rest of the info and create the double calendar!!

[daver]

Neat. That looks accurate enough to devise some leap year rules. So the tropical year is 668.5921 Mars days long. 665 is 5*7*19, so a Martian year could be 19 months of five weeks of seven days each, with either three or four non-calendar days in a year. Possibly you could group all the non-calendar days at the end of the year for a sort of Saturnalia (hey, it could be a Martian tourist attraction, like Mardi Gras or Carnivale or Income Tax Day. Martians could have parades and bungee jump and hold contests to see how far they could run naked on the surface). .5921 isn't all that attractive of a number--it's close to 3/5 or 45/76. You could I suppose make even years leap years as well as most years ending in 5 (perhaps skipping the leap day in years of the form X5, where ((X mod 76) mod 13) == 0, so 05, 135, 265, 395, etc. would not be leap years).

And start the calendar out with year 0.

Now you need to come up with names for the months (Armstronguary, Aldrinuary, ...).

Do we need a suffix indicating Mars years (akin to AD and BCE for earth)? We have some Latin speakers on the board--AM might be reasonable but it's already taken.