Martian calendar and spin offs
Last night I was reading The Case for Mars and the section on designing a Martian calendar said that the calendar would have to be divided into unequal numbers of sols (Martian days) in order for each to be about 1/12 of the planet’s orbit around the sun. I was nerd sniped, and so I wrote a blog post.
The proposed calendar has months that vary between 46 and 66 sols. Why so much variation? The orbit of Mars is more elliptical than that of Earth, but this alone doesn’t explain the difference.
The book addresses how to divide the Martian year into months, but it doesn’t address the problem of leap days. But a Martin year is not an integer number of sols, just as an Earth year is not an integer number of days. This post explains how a Martian calendar would likely account for this.
Another spin off from the Martian calendar post looks at how the speed of a planet varies. (The same applies to any two body problem, such as a satellite in an elliptical orbit around a planet.)
The ratio of maximum to minimum speed is a surprisingly simple function of eccentricity, and this is a function that comes up in a variety of applications, such as the Smith chart from electrical engineering.
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Have a good weekend.