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:
“Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.”
—Le Corbusier [Charle Édouard Jeanne] (1887–1965)
“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)
“Old age cannot be cured. An epoch or a civilization cannot be prevented from breathing its last. A natural process that happens to all flesh and all human manifestations cannot be arrested. You can only wring your hands and utter a beautiful swan song.”
—Renee Winegarten (b. 1922)