The Martian Almanac 220, Volume 1

By Thomas Gangale

The Martian Almanac presents a 669-sol almanac of the coming Martian year, drawing from writings of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was widely believed that the planet Mars harbored an advanced civilization, and "first contact" was thought to be only a few years in the future. It features observat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amazon Pro Hub
• Release date: Jan 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088082584

Thomas Gangale

Thomas Gangale holds a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California, a Master of Arts degree in international relations from San Francisco State University, and a Juridical Sciences Doctorate in space, cyber, and telecommunications law from the University of Nebraska.Upon graduating from USC, Gangale reluctantly turned down an offer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to join the Voyager mission control team due to his prior commitment to the United States Air Force. He was both an airman and an officer in the USAF, serving as an air traffic controller, an F-4 weapon systems officer, and an historian. Also while on active duty, he served on the technical management teams of several satellite projects of the highest national priority involving national technical means of verification of strategic arms control agreements, as well as a Strategic Defense Initiative satellite program and two Space Shuttle payloads (STS-4 and STS-39).He has published numerous articles in aerospace and social science journals, has presented papers at several aerospace symposia, has written opinion editorials in major metropolitan newspapers, and has appeared as a guest on international radio and television programs. He is a leading authority on timekeeping systems for other planets, and is the inventor of a class of orbits that will be essential to communication between Earth and crews in the vicinity of Mars. He was an original member of the Design and Project Management Team for the Mars Arctic Research Station, a NASA-related Mars analog research facility located near the Haughton Meteor Crater on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. His work on property rights and the international law of outer space has been briefed to senior NASA leaders. His soon-to-be-published doctoral dissertation addresses a fundamental question in space law which has confounded jurists for 60 years: where does sovereign national airspace end and outer space begin?Along with space exploration, Gangale has had a lifelong interest in history, politics, and international relations. He is the author of the American Plan for reforming the presidential nomination process, which is has the support of the California Democratic Party and has been recommended for consideration within the Democratic National Committee.

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THE MARTIAN ALMANAC

FOR THE MARTIAN YEAR 220

VOLUME 1

2022 DECEMBER 25 – 2023 DECEMBER 02

THOMAS GANGALE

Copyright © 2022 Thomas Gangale

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

MARTIAN TIME-SLIP ..................................................................................................................... 1

MARTIAN CALENDAR TIME ....................................................................................................... 5

220 SAGITTARIUS ........................................................................................................................ 13

220 DHANUS .................................................................................................................................. 27

220 CAPRICORNUS ...................................................................................................................... 39

220 MAKARA ................................................................................................................................. 51

220 AQUARIUS .............................................................................................................................. 63

220 KUMBHA ................................................................................................................................. 75

MARTIAN HISTORICAL TIME ................................................................................................... 87

220 PISCES ..................................................................................................................................... 89

220 MINA ...................................................................................................................................... 105

220 ARIES ..................................................................................................................................... 125

220 MESHA ...................................................................................................................................141

220 TAURUS ................................................................................................................................ 157

220 RISHABHA ............................................................................................................................ 181

INDEX ........................................................................................................................................... 201

To Marilyn

Sixty years ago, the song Fly Me to the Moon was translated into Italian as Portami con te (Carry Me with You).

Marilyn and I were a Martian couple, having met while working on a project for the Mars Society. It has been five years since my Marilyn passed away. My grieving period was surprisingly short. I continued her work, and in so doing, I felt that she was always with me, even feeling her standing at my shoulder as I presented a paper at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference a year later. Marilyn and I had long planned to write books together. We wrote many conference papers together, but I was too busy catching up to her academically by earning my master's and doctoral degrees to write a book with her. At last, I have written the book about Mars that we had always talked about writing together but never began. It is the first in what I hope will be a series of books that continue to be published after I have joined Marilyn. Until then, I carry her with me.

Waiting is, until fullness.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in Strange Land

MARTIAN TIME-SLIP

I was born and raised on an exotic Pacific island, as were both of my parents and both of my mother’s parents; a paradise rich in gold and pearls, inhabited by beautiful black Amazons wearing gold armor, Robust of body with strong passionate hearts and great virtue, ruled over and defended by our warrior-queen Calafia. The island is one of the wildest in the world on account of the bold and craggy rocks across its mountain ranges and overlooking its 1,300 kilometers of coastline, home to griffins and other fabulous animals. It is also home to forty million people, to the most innovative technologies on the planet, and to Earth’s sixth largest economy. It is called California.

In the paragraph above, I have mixed 15th-century fiction with 21st-century fact. Of the hundred million or so who have called California home, only a handful of scholars have ever read or even know of Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián) by Garci Ordóñez Rodríguez de Montalvo, yet this was the beginning of the mystique of California. It was said to be a land of gold in the imagination of Spanish explorers centuries before the brief 19th-century gold rus, which earned it fame as the Golden State, a reputation further burnished by the wealth created throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century in the entertainment, aerospace, and cybertechnology industries.

The Red Planet is an even more storied a place than the Golden State for all that it has no people on it as yet. Mars has had its spinners of fabulous tales: Greg, Lasswitz, Burroughs, Weinbaum, Heinlein, Bradbury, Brackett, and many others. It has been a home to advanced civilizations either thriving or declining, and to roving bands of barbarians; to fabulous beasts such as banths and flat-cats; to ethical, altruistic humanoids and to genocidal, tentacled monsters. Also, like California, Mars has had its early explorers; some Earthbound, seeing the Red Planet through a glass, darkly, reporting details more imagined than seen; others hoping to send and even claiming to have received signals from Mars; some regarding that world through electronic eyes with ever-increasing clarity and resolution, first passing by, then orbiting, then landing on and roving its dusty surface. Of the astronomers of the turn of the 20th century, who have been characterized as the first Martians, none had a greater cultural influence than those of Mars Hill above Flagstaff, Arizona. The Annals of the Lowell Observatory, three volumes spanning observations from 1894 to 1903, meticulously records observations of canals which existed only in mistaken human perception and never on the surface of Mars. Nevertheless, the canals and the dry sea beds are an indelible facet of Martian lore as tales of Barsoom continue to be written to this day, and undoubtedly Percival Lowell’s books and the annals of his observatory will be important to civilization as we have yet to know it: to a future culture of humans on Mars.

Of the robots of Mars, both past and present, the vast majority have been managed in their development and teleoperated upon their arrival at Mars, by teams of humans on that once fabulous Pacific island of California, at a site known as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; from there have come machines named Mariner, Viking, Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity, and Perseverance, and back to JPL they have reported observations far beyond the speculations of earlier Earthbound astronomers. The present work is intended as a tribute to those storytellers and explorers, a testament organized in a uniquely Martian way, looking forward to a time when Mars is home to millions of people and is a significant component of the human ecology of the Solar System.

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For now, however, Mars is a world less hospitable than was long hoped, more challenging to science than was ever dreamed, and more alien than was ever imagined; yet after a half-century of robotic exploration and as hostile an environment as it has proven to be, the great mystery remains: is Mars now or has it ever been the abode of life? If Mars turns out to be devoid of indigenous life, it will be a disappointment in that we will need to look elsewhere in the universe for evidence that we children of Earth are not alone. If we discover indigenous life on Mars, this will spawn the further question: does it share with us a common ancestor, or is it the product of alien evolution? If the latter, the fact of at least two independent geneses having occurred in a single star system leads to the conclusion that they are commonplace, that the universe is likely to be teaming with life. If the former, if Martian life is found to have a place on the phylogenetic tree as our distant cousin, the product not of a separate genesis but of the same one, this is more likely to have occurred on Mars and then carried to Earth on asteroids than the reverse process, for Mars’s gravity is much weaker than Earth’s, it is far easier for an impact event to knock a chunk of Mars into interplanetary space, to eventually land on another planet in a process known as planetary panspermia than it is to blast a fragment of Earth into space. In short, as planetary scientist Christopher P. McKay has put it, We need a Martian, dead or alive, and if we determine that it is related to us, then probably our microbial ancestors originated on Mars, hitched a ride on an asteroid, and immigrated to Earth; we may have been Martians from the very beginning.

This question of indigenous life may not be answered definitively until there is life on Mars that is alien to that planet in the person of human explorers, followed by human colonists.

The human journey to Mars, dreamed of in science fiction for more than a century, deferred in public policy for more than half a century, has garnered increasing support and now appears likely to occur during the middle third of the 21st century. It is obvious that accomplishing this will require our developing new material culture to survive and thrive in this unforgiving environment. Less obvious, but no less inevitable, is that we will also need to adapt aspects of our non-material culture to living on Mars. Among these, most fundamentally, is our reckoning of time, which will be detailed in the following section, for that is for the future of Mars.

The Red Planet’s past begins, as does California’s, in the imagination. Montalvo’s romantic invention of California has been all but buried in time, as the vast bulk of what has been written about the Golden State since the first Europeans set foot upon that land has quite overwhelmed his lone 15th-century fantasy. Still, the romance of Spanish California continues to captivate, kept alive in tales of Zorro that have evolved from Johnston McCulley’s original writings, as does the allure of Lowellian Mars in the continuing adventures of John Carter; here again, we find these worlds are linked, for these two swashbuckling heroes first emerged from the pages of the same magazine during the same decade.1 For Mars, the romance of its past may have a much longer and stronger cultural reach, however, for so much has been written about the Red Planet before anyone has been there that ages may go by before much of this literature becomes no more than quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. Indeed, other than Earth, no planet in the universe has had more written about it than Mars. For this reason, Mars may always be a unique place in human history, in that explorers and eventually settlers will go about their daily tasks on a world whose present is indelibly colored by a past that existed only in the imagination of a host of visionaries who looked to the future, and not only in scientific and fictional prose, 1 The All-Story during the 1910s.

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but also in art, music, and poetry. This is truly the essence of, to appropriate Philip K. Dick’s title, the Martian time-slip.

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MARTIAN CALENDAR TIME

Time has a texture in human perception; it has a fragrance and a taste, and in it are embedded shapes, colors, sounds, and emotions. A year is not merely a number; it brings to mind where we were, what we were doing, who was with us, and what music was popular during that time. The difference between one year and another is not a simple mathematical operation of subtraction, it is a complex navigation through human experiences. Even if we were not alive during a certain year—1945, 1776, 1492—by virtue of a sense of history it has a meaning to us that evokes a flood of sensations, and on specific dates as we voyage through each year—July 4, September 11, December 7—we may observe anniversaries with pride, or in sorrow, or as one which lives in infamy.

1969 July 20 is a date that belongs more to the Moon than to Earth. Mars too has its own set of dates, although none so celebrated as this one, since a human boot print has yet to be impressed upon its ruddy regolith, but they exist nonetheless—notes and sketches taken down at observatories, stories and illustrations published in magazines and books, music released on vinyl and optical disc—and as that world becomes a new stage peopled with players yet unborn, new layers of texture will be laid upon Martian time, becoming ever richer and more vibrant. As Ecclesiastes 3:1 reminds us, To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose; just as a particular month on Earth brings to mind summer breezes or winter storms and how they bear on human activities, so future poets will write of Martian months and seasons, expanding on the brief glimpse of Oliver Wendell Holmes from millions of miles away:

The snows that glittered on the disk of Mars

Have melted, and the planet's fiery orb

Rolls in the crimson summer of its year;

As to the practical uses of marking the passage of time, we live the present day by day, waking, working, eating, recreating, sleeping, et cetera; furthermore, we reflect on the past and plan for the future in terms of weeks, months, and years. The day and the year are astronomical cycles, based respectively on the rotation of Earth on its axis and its orbit around the Sun. The month is also an astronomical cycle in lunar calendars (for instance, the Islamic calendar) and lunisolar calendars (such as the Chinese and Hebrew calendars), being based on the synodic period of the Moon around Earth of 29.53 days, but in solar calendars (for example, the Gregorian calendar), the month is a socially-constructed unit of time dividing the year into twelve parts; likewise, the week, although originally suggested by the four principal phases of the Moon (new moon, first quarter, full moon, and third quarter), is also a social construct of seven days.

We will transplant this legacy set of practices to Mars and adapt it to the planet’s distinct natural cycles. A lucky break for humans is that the rotation of Mars is not greatly different from that of Earth, thus our sleep/wake cycle of 24 hours will not be thrown off kilter by a 10-hour or 40-hour rotation period as we may struggle to contend with on habitable extrasolar planets in the far future. On Mars, the solar day/night cycle, known as the sol,

is 24.67 hours, well within proven human adaptability. Because the rotational axis of Mars 4

is tilted at a similar angle to the plane of its orbit (25.2° as compared to Earth’s 23.4°), the Martian environment experiences pronounced seasonal changes, which will have important economic ramifications such as power generation (both solar and wind) and consumption (especially heating), thus the period of Mars’s revolution around the Sun must be taken into account in a timekeeping system for human activities on that planet.2 Having nothing at all to do with Mars’s astronomical cycles, the month and the week are so deeply rooted in the human non-material culture that they ought to be adapted to Mars, absent a compelling reason not to do so. It is upon these basic principles that I developed the Darian calendar for Mars in 1985, published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society the following year. It is certainly not the first Martian calendar ever invented, and many others have been proposed since, but it is one that has come to be widely diffused and used, having been mentioned in at least four novels set on Mars, printed and sold as calendars in several countries and languages, and implemented in about a half-dozen web applications; there are even plans to market Darian timepieces. Meanwhile, since 2004, JPL teams have been living according to the time on Mars as they have continuously operated the various rovers and stations on the Martian surface. As the exploration of Mars by remote presence continues, leading to eventual human expeditions, stations, and settlements, the desirability of a diary of events pertaining to the history of Mars, combined with the need emerges for a sol planner for rover and station operators as well as for the interested public.

The design of the Darian calendar is as follows. There are 668.6 sols in a Martian revolution around the Sun; since no distinctive term is now in common use for this period of time, as

sol is distinct from the Earth day, this volume uses the term marsrev. Just as there are longer and shorter calendar years in Earth’s Gregorian calendar to keep it in synchronization with the 365.25-day year (the longer year is referred to informally as a leap year, formally as a bissextile year3), there are longer and shorter calendar marsrevs; however, in reverse of the Gregorian calendar, on Mars, the longer year is more common than the shorter year, in other words, a leap backward rather than forward. Because of this, the occasional shorter year is referred to as demosextile since a diurnal period is deducted (demo) rather than repeated (bis). A common calendar marsrev contains 669 sols; a demosextile marsrev contains 668 sols. Demosextile marsrevs are those whose sequential number is divisible by 2, except for those which are divisible by 10; thus, there are six common years in every decade. For example, the marsrev 218 is demosextile because it is divisible by 2, 219 is common because it is not divisible by 2, and 220 is common because it is divisible by 10.

The calendar marsrev begins on or about the sol when Mars is at solar longitude (LS) = 0°, which is the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere and the autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere; to eliminate the need to specify which hemisphere is at issue, the terms northward equinox is used since the Sun is crossing Mars’s celestial equator from south to north. Similarly, the other seasons of Mars are marked by the northern solstice, the southward equinox, and the southern solstice.4

2 This already occurs; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s reports of Spirit and Opportunity rover activity document restrictions in activity around the winter solstice due to low Sun angles reducing available power.

3The term derives from the Romans practice of repeating ante dies VI Kalendas Martius, the sixth day before the Kalends of March.

4 Not only does Mars’s axis have a slightly different inclination, it also is tilted in a much different direction. The northern solstice occurs when the Sun is in the constellation Pisces as seen from Mars, while the constellation of the southern solstice is Virgo; thus, the northern tropic circle is Tropicus Piscium and the southern tropic circle is Tropicus Virginis.

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Image 1

The length of the calendar month is close to that of the month on Earth; again, no distinct term for this unit of time is in common use, but given that language for Martian surface feature nomenclature is Latin, the Martian analog of the month might be called the mensis

similarly, the Martian analog of the week might be called the vicis.5 In any case, there are 24 menses, typically comprised of 28 sols, into which the 7-sol vicis fits perfectly. Well, almost perfectly. In demosextile marsrevs, four of the menses, spaced evenly throughout the marsrev, contain only 27 sols. Each mensis begins on the first day of the vicis. The menses are named for twelve of the constellations through which the Sun passes along the Martian ecliptic during the course of the marsrev,6 twelve Latin names alternating with twelve Sanskrit names in a blending of western and eastern cultural influences.7 The sols of the vicis are taken from the Latin names of the terrestrial days of the week, most of which will be familiar to the 800 million speakers of Romance languages.8

At this point, other Martian timekeeping conventions deserve mention. NASA, including JPL, counts sols from the beginning of each mission on the surface of Mars; this practice began with the landing of Viking 1 on 1976 July 20, although the practice has been inconsistent in that some missions have begun with Sol 0 while others have begun with Sol 5 The terms week and month tend to be used with less precise intent than are day and year,

rather like further is used more metaphorically whereas farther is meant more literally. For this reason, as well as the fact that the length of a Martian week or month is not radically different from its Earthly counterpart, distinctive Martian terms may never come into common usage.

6 The first known mention of Ophiuchus, the thirteenth constellation, sandwiched between Scorpius and Sagittarius, was not until the 4th century BCE, by which time the tradition of twelve zodiacal constellations, descending from Babylonian astronomy, had been established for a millennium.

7 The Sanskrit names for the twelve ancient zodiacal constellations, or derivations thereof, became the names of the months in the Hindu solar calendar, representing the time of year during which the Sun passed through these constellations. The correlation between the Sun’s passage and the timing of the months was inexact from the beginning, as the months were approximately equal spans of time (30 or 31 days), therefore representing approximately equal arcs of 30 degrees along the ecliptic; however, the zodiacal constellations do not span equal arcs, with some being wider and some narrower. As the millennia have passed, the correlation between the Sun’s passage and the timing of the months on the Hindu solar calendar has been entirely broken due to the precession of Earth’s rotational axis.

8 Sol Solis, Sol Lunae, Sol Martis, Sol Mercurii, Sol Jovis, Sol Veneris, Sol Saturni.

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1. In 1998, planetary scientist Michael D. Allison proposed the Mars Sol Date (MSD) as a Martian analog to the terrestrial Julian Day; the epoch he chose was the most recent date on which there was a near coincidence of the Earth and Mars planetocentric solar longitudes,

which was on 1873 December 29. In a 2000 peer-reviewed journal article, planetary scientists Robert T. Clancy et alia adopted the arbitrary convention in which 1955, April 11, when Mars was at LS=0°, was the beginning of Martian year 1. These conventions make perfect sense from the focus of mission controllers and planetary scientists in their work; the Darian calendar, however, is intended as a civil calendar for an emergent Martian culture, and the civil calendar counts years in celebration of some event of great cultural importance. For instance, a common practice in ancient times was to count the years from the beginning of the reign of the current monarch; the epoch for the Hebrew calendar is the date of Creation (3761 BCE) as calculated by the medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides); various epochs for the Chinese calendar are defined by the beginning of the reign of an emperor (Huángdì, 2697 BCE; Yáo, 2156 BCE) or the birth year of Kǒng Fūzǐ (Confucius, 551 BCE); the Romans counted years from