Martian New Year on Sunday a second chance to start fresh, Earthling

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https://www.thetelegram.com/lifestyles/entertainment/martian-new-year-on-sunday-a-second-chance-to-start-fresh-earthling-549591/

Source: By Chris Knight, The Telegram. 

Excerpt: ...Feb. 7 [2021] marks the beginning of [Martian] year 36. Back at the turn of the (Earth) century ...scientists decided they needed a way to count Martian years. Earth years wouldn’t do, since Mars takes 687 days to circle the sun. They picked the Martian spring equinox of 1955 as the start of year one. ...Mars, like Earth, has an elliptical orbit that brings it closer to the sun at certain points of the year. It also has an axial tilt of 25 degrees. (Earth’s is just over 23.) Together this creates seasons, with variations in temperature, sunlight and even air pressure, since some of the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere freezes at the poles in the winter. ...the overlap of tilt and orbit means northern Martian winters are significantly milder than in the south, with repercussions on any rovers operating in that hemisphere. ...Mars has its own days, commonly called sols. ...Nick Peper, a systems engineer on the team that operates the Curiosity rover, notes that a sol is almost the same length as a day, but that slight difference can cause problems. Earth’s day is 23 hours and 56 minutes long, the rounding of which gives us a leap day every four years. But a sol is 24 hours 39 minutes, or about 3% longer than a day. About once a month, the two line up briefly. ...To keep Martian morning from drifting away from the actual sunrise, scientists merely lengthen each second, minute and hour on Mars by a factor of 1.02749. So a sol on Mars is 24 hours long, but every hour is a little long than its equivalent on Earth. It’s a good fix, though perhaps not as poetic as the one imagined by science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, who in his Mars trilogy writes of “the timeslip,” when clocks stop every sol at midnight for 39 minutes. ...“It’s just close enough to lull you into thinking they’re the same length,” Peper says of Martian time units. “And just far enough apart to mess you up.” ...Curiosity recently passed its 3,000th sol on Mars.... See also Martian Time Lookup, Mars clock, and EarthSky article 
Upcoming Martian New Years:
37 - Dec 26 2022
38 - Nov 12 2024
39 - Sep 30 2026
40 - Aug 17 2028

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