Mars fans will have to break out their New Year’s champagne in early 2022.
The new year on Mars began today (Dec. 26), NASA said, after the Perseverance rover set a milestone by depositing two caches of material on the Red Planet that will be used in a future sample return mission.
“No, We’re Not Accidentally Partying Early,” NASA Mars The Twitter account joked, (opens in new tab) Referring to the Gregorian calendar, most of the world follows; The new year of that system would end on January 1 as usual. (Your tradition may have different New Years, though.)
NASA and several other space agencies are scouring the surface of the Red Planet in search of signs of ancient life, culminating in a NASA-European sample return mission that could bring back regolith in the 2030s.
related: 12 Amazing Photos From the Perseverance Rover’s First Year on Mars
The first Mars flyby by Mariner 4 was on July 14, 1965, but the New Year count for the Red Planet begins when the planet reached its northern spring equinox in 1955. ,” NASA officials wrote on Twitter.
“The number of years of Mars,” he said, “helps scientists keep track of long-term observations, such as weather data collected by NASA spacecraft over decades.”
Since Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth, it takes almost twice as long for the Red Planet to orbit our Sun. A Martian year is 687 days long and, coincidentally, the last time we rang in the New Year on the Red Planet, Perseverance hadn’t even landed yet.
The car-sized rover finally touched down on February 18, 2021, about 11 days after the Martian New Year was celebrated. In addition to dropping lightsaber-sized caches on the planet’s surface, a companion helicopter called Ingenuity has already completed 37 flights and is expected to take to the skies again soon.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “why am i tall (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow him on Twitter @howlspace (opens in new tab), Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) Or Facebook (opens in new tab),