Mars calendar, mission sols in a standard calendar Options

[Phil Stooke]

This file is something I put together to relate sols for all Mars lander missions to the standard Mars calendar devised by Clancy et al. and now widely used with orbital data. I'm posting it in case it might be useful to others.

It's an Excel file, so it can easily be extended if necessary. Each mission is given three columns, one for mission sols on the surface (some start with sol 0, some with sol 1, according to mission usage), one for the Mars year and one for the sol of that year.

Please note that there may be discrepancies of one sol here and there because I am simplifying things quite a lot here. For instance, MER-A and MER-B are half a planet apart, so their sols are half a sol out of phase, but I'm ignoring that in relating them to the planet-wide sol of the Clancy system. Details of the Mars calendar can be found on Emily's website at:

http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-top...s-calendar.html

(I have made independent lists of Mars historical dates in my forthcoming Mars atlas). And conversions to Earth dates can be made via this VERY useful website:

http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/mars/time/martian_time.html

Phil

 mars_calendars.xls ( 323.5K ) Number of downloads: 138

[djellison]

It seems that most quote :

An intercomparison of ground-based millimeter, MGS
TES, and Viking atmospheric temperature
measurements' Seasonal and interannual variability of
temperatures and dust loading in the global Mars atmosphere
R. T. Clancy, • B. J. Sandor, 2 M. J. Wolff, • P. R. Christensen,
J. C. Pearl, 4 B. J. Conrath, 5 and R. J. Wilson

As the source for the 1955 date. In that paper, they simply say:

For the purpose of this comparison, we
use the solar longitude range 0ø-360 ø to define a Mars
year and adopt April 11, 1955 (L$=0 ø) as the beginning
of year 1. In this arbitrary convention, the Mariner 9,
Viking, Phobos, and Pathfinder missions occurred in
years 9-10, 12-15, 19-20, and 23, respectivel