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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Forum Management Topics _ A suggestion: sol date added to Mars lander postings.

Posted by: CryptoEngineer Sep 18 2012, 04:27 PM

First, let me say that I love UMSF; it's a near-daily stop for me, though I post rarely. I have a suggestion, but understand it could be an annoying amount of work.

Many missions have a 'mission day' of some kind - usually the number of Earth days since launch.

However the Mars lander missions, MER1&2, Phoenix, and now MSL, also make heavy use of 'Mars days since landing', aka 'sols'.

It is very common for postings to refer to past events by their 'sol', and I often find that I want to look at postings relating to what happened on that sol.

My suggestion is that the 'sol date' be added to the posting date of posts in the MSL and Opportunity forums. This would be a very convenient reference for many of us following these intrepid robots. I have no idea how hard this would be - it would depend on the intricacies of how posts are stored and dated, and I am completely unfamiliar with the IP Board SW. It may be as simple as a mod to the date-field generation routine, or it might be far more difficult.

Making suggestions is the easy part; if this is judged 'not worth the effort', I have no basis for complaint.

thanks

CE

Posted by: Astro0 Sep 18 2012, 10:42 PM

Nice thought, but I'm thinking that this would be difficult to implement and maintain.
Plus, poor 'helvick' has enough technical issues to deal with.

My suggestion is to use Mars Clock http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/

It will happily sit on your desktop and give you the time, date, sol etc

There are also Apps for smartphones these days.

Match date and sol...done!