Happy New Year to Mars! NASA sounds the 37th year of the red planet
Martian fans will have to pop their New Year’s champagne a little early in 2022.
the new year March began today (Dec. 26), NASA said, days after the Perseverance Rover set a milestone on the Red Planet through the deposit two caches of material which will be used in a future sample return mission.
“No, we’re not accidentally celebrating early,” NASA Mars The Twitter account joked, (opens in a new tab) referring to the Gregorian calendar followed by most of the world; the new year of this system will be clicked on as usual on January 1st. (Your tradition may have different New Years, though.)
NASA and several other space agencies are scouring the Red Planet’s surface for signs of ancient life, culminating in a joint NASA-European sample return mission that could carry regolith in the 1930s.
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s first year on Mars
The first flyby of Mars happened Sailor 4 on July 14, 1965, but for the New Year of the Red Planet, scientists start counting from when the planet reached its northern vernal equinox in 1955. “An arbitrary point to start, but it’s useful have a system,” NASA officials wrote on Twitter.
“Numbering the years of Mars,” they added, “helps scientists track long-term observations, such as weather data collected by NASA spacecraft over the decades.”
Since Mars is farther from the sun than land, it takes about twice as long for the Red Planet to circle our sun. A Martian year is 687 days long, and by the way, the last time we rang in the new year on the Red Planet, Perseverance hadn’t landed yet.
The car-sized rover landed on February 18, 2021, about 11 days after the last Martian New Year celebration. In addition to leaving cache in the shape of a lightsaber on the planet’s surface, a companion helicopter called Ingenuity has already done so completed 37 flights and is expected to return to heaven soon.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller? (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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