The Areosynchronous Calendar and Clock
I wanted a calendar and clock for Virtual Mars so important
events in the history of VM can be recorded as the project develops.
Note that the clocks (to the left) are currently using the Universal
Time setting on your computer, so if you have not set this
accurately on your machine then the clocks will also be
correspondingly inaccurate.
Many systems for Martian clocks and calendars have been proposed.
My goal in preparing a timekeeping system for VM was not necessarily
to invent an original alternative - all I initially wanted was to
find one that I felt represented the ideal solution. I investigated
many of the previously proposed systems and also experimented
myself, with almost every reasonable combination of week and month
lengths and variations on clock units.
After considerable evaluation my conclusion is that,
mathematically speaking, the
Darian Calendar by Tom Gangale is the optimal calendar for Mars.
This is perhaps not surprising, as Tom is the author of the
Martian Time Website, which is, as far as I know, the best
available resource on this topic. The Darian Calendar was first
presented by Tom Gangale in the June 1986 issue of the Journal of
the British Interplanetary Society, and again at the inaugural Mars
Society convention in 1998.
I've made no changes at all to the underlying mathematics of the
Darian Calendar, although I have adopted almost entirely new
nomenclature. My research uncovered various practical and aesthetic
names and naming systems for various calendar terms, and I've
incorporated those which I prefer, to create an all-round optimal
and appealing calendar called the Areosynchronous Calendar.
I've made every effort to be accurate about assignment of
credit.
The Darian Calendar and most other calendars for Mars incorporate
the 'stretched' clock, first used by JPL during the Viking missions,
which is based on the same 24:60:60 system of units as Earth - each
Mars time unit is simply longer than the corresponding Earth unit by
the same fraction that the Mars day is longer than the Earth day.
There are several reasons to accept this clock (as I almost did),
however I eventually concluded that the colonization of Mars
presents us with a golden opportunity to convert to metric time, and
that the benefits of doing this are worth the challenge of
implementation. I have therefore designed a simple, yet elegant and
practical metric clock for Mars called the Areosynchronous
Clock (to be posted soon).
Please enjoy:
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