Ep 13 of Aria, the Animation begins with Akari sending a letter to Ai on Earth. "Ai, today is the 31st day of the 24th month."

The Mars year isn't precisely twice an Earth year. Earth years are 365.24 days. So two Earth years are 730.48 days. A Mars year is 686.97 earth days, 43 and a half days less than that.

Worse, a Mars day is longer than an Earth day (by 39 minutes, 35 seconds), so a Mars year is 668.6 Mars days. (Mars has about 35 days for every 36 Earth days.)

If you divided that into 24 months, they'd average 27.8 days each.

If you made the year 22 months, you come in with an average length of 30.4 Mars days.

Wikipedia has a good article about the problems of coming up with a calendar for Mars.

UPDATE: Of course, if they could terraform Mars, and build a moon for it, maybe they were also able to correct its orbit to be exactly twice Earth's orbital period, eh? And adjust the Martian day while they were at it?

You could get all three of those simultaneously using asteroid impacts. Hit the night side of the planet with glancing blows from behind the planet in its solar orbit: you could speed up the spin, add orbital energy and boost the planet into a higher, slower, orbit, and knock debris loose to form a moon. Hmm?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 05:54 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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