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A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth, so astronomers have a word for that unit of time. They call it a sol, from the Latin word for sun.
NASA scientists refer to and the day before the current sol as yestersol. They tried some other neologisms for the day after the current Martian day, including nextersol and morrowsol, but those terms never really caught on.
Imagine you're spending the day — or rather, the sol — on Mars. What would you see? For one thing, you'd see lots of hematite. It's a mineral that usually forms in the presence of water, but not always. If you guessed that the name of this dark-red mineral shares a linguistic root with other words deriving from Greek haima, or "blood," such hemoglobin, you'd be right.
You'd also see the red, yellow, or brown mineral known as goethite (pronounced "GURR-tight"). This is the mineral that got NASA scientists all excited in 2004 when the Mars rover Spirit detected it. Goethite can't form without water, so the discovery raised hopes of someday finding water on Mars, or at least evidence that it once existed.
Wait, goethite? Does that name have anything to do with the great German writer Goethe — the one who observed, "Everything is simpler than one can imagine and yet complicated and intertwined beyond comprehension"?
Indeed, goethite may be the only mineral named for a poet. It turns out that in addition to writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was intensely interested in geology, so much so that he amassed 18,000 minerals in a legendary collection that was said to be the largest in Europe.
Here's another relevant quotation (in translation) from Goethe:
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
And do we have a "fine picture" for you.
In fact, I've been so taken with the above image of Mars since I first saw it that it's now bookmarked in my browser. As a friend put it, "Superlatives are inadequate; words fail. Look. Think. Be in awe."
Let me just add that to fully appreciate this picture, you must click and hold your mouse or use your directional keys to move the image around and take advantage of the 360-degree view.
Imagine what Goethe would have made of that.
Photo courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
The picture was fantastic. I was really impressed, but the Martian language words impressed me deeply, too. While reading Mars-speak words like sol, yestersol, nextersol, etc., George Orwell's newspeak words, such as thinkpol, Minitrue, Minipax, Goodthink, crossed my mind at once. I think there is some word-building similarity between Martian language and that of G.Orwell's Newspeak.
In George Orwell's famous "1984" we read : 'Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak ( or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050..........' (from the Appendix)
I wonder what direction will the English language take if Mars-speak or Newspeak gain popularity. Supposing yestersol, nextersol or sol gain frequency of usage in English or develop a number of new meanings, will this be a change for the better or for the worse?
Mars-speak words are a blendings? Yes? For instance, yestersol is made up of yester/yesterday/+sol. Nonetheless, somehow they do not sound English. Isn't it ,in a way, code-switching? Just Look, yesterday is an English word, whereas "sol" is a Spanish word now, meaning "sun" as in Latin. An interesting word formation way, isn't it?
Lastly, In USA Today (2/23/2004) I read: "I suspect there will be a dictionary by the time we finish" Bass said.
I searched on the Internet but failed to find a Martian dictionary. I wonder if there is any. It would be interesting to learn more.
I looked for a Martian dictionary too, and I don't think it's out there (yet).
But it would be a pretty small dictionary at this point. Sure, there's the sol variations on day. And I've heard/read the term marsquakes to describe tectonic events, but not much else.
Here on Earth we use the word earth as a synonym for dirt or soil. But no such synonym has surfaced for Martian soil. They don't call it mars, and I've occasionally heard soil, but the preferred term (among scientists) seems to be the generic regolith ... same thing they call the soil on the Moon.
Speaking as a long-time sci-fi fan, I would rule that there's no need for a different word for the Martian day. For everyday purposes, 37 minutes isn't enough to make it necessary; colonists on Mars can email to their friends on Earth about their "day" without confusion, with the need only rarely to remind each other that the two days are different by about 2 ½%.
And if Martologists feel the need for a special word for it, "sol" is surely a bad choice. What'll they use for the Venerian day, when we get there, the Jovian day, the Saturnian day and so on? Better, surely, to coin a word that reflects the locale; perhaps "marteday", "veneriday", "joveday" and so on.
What is interesting to me is not the words to be used but the actual measurement. Must Martians measure time up to 24:37 before they change over to the new day? It could work, I suppose, but it seems a little clumsy. Or should they expand all the measurements by 2 ½%, so that a second is 2.569% longer? That would make their days 24 hours longer—Martian hours. But no, that's unthinkable; the second is already ensconced in both the cgs and fps systems; no scientist would countenance it. And as we move out to other places, timekeeping gets even more complicated. There'd have to be a standard "year"; a local year could still be defined as one revolution of a planet around its sun but a standard year would have to consist of some number of seconds, say 30 000, and everyone else would have to know the relationship between his own year and the standard.
Personally, if I lived on Mars I would see nothing wrong with having a day consisting of 24 standard hours plus a sort of leap hour 37 minutes long. Maybe it could be observed right after 13:00 in each time zone; it would provide a slightly longer lunch hour.
Good point about planets other than Mars also needing their own terms. They might need to prefix sol with Martian, Venusian, etc. One could even speak of an Earth sol and still be consistent.
But once Mars is colonized, I see no problem with simply saying day, as you point out. Doubt there would be any confusion about what is meant, even when communicating back to Earth. If you say "Yesterday was spent working on my research paper." the meaning will be quite clear.
It's only in scientific contexts that the difference becomes important. When tracking the progress of a mission on the Red Planet, it's sensible to talk about Sol 1 and Sol 2 and Sol 3. Converting to an Earth-based calendar is cumbersome at best.
And that's especially true when it comes to synchronizing clocks. Like in Antarctica, where the time zone meridians all come together, it's been internationally agreed that the entire continent will use Universal Time and set their clocks to Greenwich. UTC is what NASA uses to coordinate mission events (corrected for light travel time).
Asusena, thanks for your thoughts. The more you listen to our show, the more you'll find we tend to embrace change and evolution and acquisition in the English language. If all the languages gave a party, English would be the one going around and looking at everyone's plate, asking, "Are you going to eat that?" 🙂
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
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