Year Length and Intercalation
The basic time periods from which the calendar is constructed are the Martian solar day (sometimes called a sol) and the Martian vernal equinox year, which is slightly different from the tropical year. The sol is 39 minutes 35.244 seconds longer than the Terrestrial solar day and the Martian vernal equinox year is 668.5907 sols in length. The basic intercalation formula therefore allocates six 669-sol years and four 668-sol years to each Martian decade. The former (still called leap years even though they are more common than non-leap years) are years that are either odd (not evenly divisible by 2) or else are evenly divisible by 10. The calendar error from the actual seasons is small, but the calendar is too slow by about 13 sols every 1400 Martian tropical years.
Read more about this topic: Darian Calendar
Famous quotes containing the words year and/or length:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“They raise their minds by brooding over and embellishing their sufferings, from one degree of fervid exaltation and dreary greatness to another, till at length they run amuck entirely, and whoever meets them would do well to run them thro’ the body.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)