Mars clock

The idea was to create the most humanly readable modification of the Darian calendar. I named it Scarlett calendar. Sol (a Martian day) has 24 hours like Earth day, but Martian second is just slightly longer (as can be seen in the clock itself) which results in day length of 24 hours, 37 minutes and approximately 23 seconds. Martian weeks have 7 sols, every month has exactly 4 weeks and Martian year has 24 months. This is basicaly same as in original Darian calendar. Complete layout can bee seen here.

Differences start with the prime meridian, which was chosen not conventionally (the first landing spot of man-made object) but rather by matching the time with actual daylight (sollight?) on the Red Planet. This way, prime meridian happens to match the location of the highest mountain on Mars (and Solar System), Olympus Mons. Because of the difference, time zone with new prime meridian is called "0 offset time zone" just to avoid confusion with the NASAs one (Airy-0). Table below lists all time zones, with most notable landmark in it.

Note, that geographic features spanning trough multiple time zones are not included, to avoid confusion.

Darian calendar starts on Earths date UTC 00:00 11th April 1609 which is an astronomical convention for first use of telescope in the field. My modification starts with year 1, not year 0 like the original. Darian calendar also designates the first day of each month as the start of a new week, which results in a one-day weekend occurring three or four times a year. I am not certain how this would be received by future Martian colonists, so I didn't implemented Martian day names, week count as well as winter/summer time shifts or any holidays whatsoever in Scarlett calendar.

Since the calendar is on the web, it is not very useful extraterrestrially. So I made a portable version which you can fit on your Raspberry Pi or any portable device running Java. It runs in GUI mode and terminal as well and is released under GPL so you can download, use and modify it freely.

What about other celestial bodies in the Solar System? All relatively good colonization candidates have a problem adopting a customized timekeeping format due to their vastly different synodic rotation periods compared to that of Earth. Homo sapiens are biologically programmed to function on a 24 to 26-hour day. Therefore, it is much easier to implement the classic Gregorian calendar with a 24-hour day and disregard the actual daylight period (especially since the thin atmospheres and natural luminous intensity would require artificial lighting anyway).

However, it is important to keep track of local daylight duration for technical purposes, such as photovoltaic system management, energy conservation during spacewalks, or monitoring surface temperature. Nasa is actually working on their custom timekeeping format for future Moon missions. You can read more about it here.

Mars clock is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE like aerospace engineering, tax payments and/or time travel.