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Mars' Calendar. Time on Mars is easily divided into days based on its rotation rate and years based on its orbit. Sols, or Martian solar days, are only 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than Earth days, and there are 668 sols (687 Earth days) in a Martian year.
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Darian calendar. The Darian calendar is a proposed system of timekeeping designed to serve the needs of any possible future human settlers on the planet Mars. It was created by aerospace engineer, political scientist, and space jurist Thomas Gangale in 1985 and named by him after his son Darius.
Timekeeping on Mars. (In red) Martian season lengths and time as compared to seasons on Earth (in blue), with marks for the vernal equinox, perihelion, and aphelion. Though no standard exists, numerous calendars and other timekeeping approaches have been proposed for the planet Mars.
Each martian day is 39 min 35.244 seconds longer than earth day. Each martian year has 668.5907 martian days. To have an accurate calendar, leap years are added. In 10 years, there will be 6 years of 669-day-year (leap year), and 4 years of 668-day-year (common year).
Figure out what day in the Martian calendar it corresponds to. This will be inaccurate (not all months and years have the same length, in fact the Darian calendar has more "leap" years than non leap years!) but it should get us close. Consider the flyby of Mariner 4, which happened on 15 July 1965. 15 July is the 196th day of the Terran year.
The Martian Common Era Calendar. No human has ever walked on Mars, and yet people have been designing Martian calendars for more than a century now! In fact, there have been at least 70 different calendars proposed, and none of these is official.
To keep the calendar in harmony with the Martian seasons, Dr. Gangale proposed that even-numbered years have 668 Martian days (except those divisible by 10), and odd-numbered years have 669 Martian days. That works out to an average of 668.6 — the length of a Martian year.
