Happy New Year on Mars! NASA heralds the year 37 of the Red Planet
Fans of Mars will have to break out their New Year’s champagne a little early in 2022.
Up the new year Mars began today (Dec. 26), NASA said, days after the Perseverance robber set a milestone on the Red Planet by plunging two caches of material which will be used in a future sample return.
“No, we’re not accidentally celebrating early,” said NASA Mars Twitter account joked, (opens in new tab) referring to the Gregorian calendar that most of the world follows; that system’s new year clicks on January 1 as usual. (However, your tradition may have a different New Year.)
NASA and several other space agencies are roaming the Red Planet’s surface looking for signs of ancient life, culminating in a joint NASA-European sample return mission that could bring regolith back to the 2030s.
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s first year on Mars
The first Mars flyby was over sailor 4 on July 14, 1965, but for the Red Planet’s new year, scientists start counting from when the planet reached its northern vernal equinox in 1955. “An arbitrary point to start with, but it’s helpful to have a system to have,” NASA officials wrote on Twitter.
“Numbering Martian years,” they added, “helps scientists track long-term observations, such as weather data collected by NASA spacecraft over the past few decades.”
Because Mars is farther from the sun than Soil, it takes about twice as long for the Red Planet to orbit our sun. A Martian year lasts 687 days and, by the way, the last time we ring in the New Year on the Red Planet, Perseverance hadn’t even landed yet.
The car-sized rover landed on Feb. 18, 2021, about 11 days after the last New Year was celebrated on Mars. Except leave lightsaber caches on the surface of the planet, a companion helicopter named Ingenuity has already done so completed 37 flights and is expected to go back on the air soon.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in new tab)(ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a space medicine book. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
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