Epoch
Gangale originally chose late 1975 as the epoch of the calendar in recognition of the American Viking program as the first fully successful American soft landing mission to Mars and ignoring the earlier 1971 Soviet Mars 3 Landing. In 2002 he adopted the Telescopic Epoch, first suggested by Peter Kokh, which is in 1609 in recognition of Johannes Kepler's use of Tycho Brahe's observations of Mars to elucidate the laws of planetary motion, and also Galileo Galilei's first observations of Mars with a telescope. Selection of the Telescopic Epoch avoids the problem of the many telescopic observations of Mars over the past 400 years being relegated to negative dates.
Read more about this topic: Darian Calendar
Famous quotes containing the word epoch:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptable ... so that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch—an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still “like us.””
—Serge Daney (1944–1992)
“The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence,—luxury, scepticism, weariness and superstition,—are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)