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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.
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.
This year is the year of the dragon, the fifth of a 12-year cycle of animals in the Chinese calendar. As people born in the year of the dragon are thought to have more power, luck and success than other animals, birth dates in China tend to increase during this lunar year.
One of the most popular — the Darian calendar — was created in 1985 by Thomas Gangale, a space law expert. It breaks up the lengthy year into 24 months of 27 and 28 Martian days — each of which alternates between Latin and Sanskrit names for constellations of the zodiac, like Virgo and its Sanskrit equivalent, Kanya.
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. It's a challenging and fun problem, and it's never too early to think about these things.
One of the calendars that does address this issue is the Darian Calendar. It was developed by Thomas Gangale in 1998, and a varying intercalation schema was added in 2006.
As our goal of sending humans to Mars edges closer, it becomes more and more imperative to develop a colendar to be used to monitor Martian time. A Martian year, or the time it takes for the planet to make one complete trip around the sun, is comprised of approximately 668.5991 sols.
