Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Sol (borrowed from the Latin word for sun) is a solar day on Mars; that is, a Mars-day. A sol is the apparent interval between two successive returns of the Sun to the same meridian (sundial time) as seen by an observer on Mars. It is one of several units for timekeeping on Mars. A sol is slightly longer than an Earth day.
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.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 (which corresponds to 686.9711 days on Earth).
The calculation takes into account that a Mars Sol is a few dozen minutes longer than an Earth day. NASA and secondary sources provide Sol numbers, but do not always give a UTC time or any Earth time zone for the events on Mars. NASA provides photographs from the events with a timestamp in local Mars time that facilitates the calculation. See here.
A convention used by spacecraft lander projects to date has been to enumerate local solar time using a 24-hour "Mars clock" on which the hours, minutes and seconds are 2.75% longer than their standard (Earth) durations. This has the advantage that no handling of times greater than 23:59 is needed, so standard tools can be used.
At the start of the mission the solar panels could provide up to around 900 watt-hours (Wh) per day to recharge the battery and power system in one Sol, but this could vary due to a variety of factors. [48] In Eagle crater the cells were producing about 840 Wh per day, but by Sol 319 in December 2004, it had dropped to 730 Wh per day. [50]
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this stereo view of the rover's surroundings on the 959th sol, or Martian day, of its surface mission (Oct. 5, 2006). Here NASA is writing quite clearly that by sol they mean Martian day. Whether or not the term can be applied to other planets ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
As Mars2020 touched down mid afternoon local time, a clock started at the time of touchdown would lag between the mission clock by about 15 Mars hours." [use SpaceCraft Event Time (SCET) rather than Earth Received Time (ERT) which may be "off by about 14 minutes"]. in summary, "if you plug the time and date UT 2021-02-18 13:50:00 into an ...