I wrote: >http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/time/time_scale_expt
Version 0.001 is up. This release does Martian time, including the timezones used by the rover missions. (Martian rotation is much easier to model than Terran, because Mars has no large moon, tectonics, or oceans, all of which make the Earth's rotation rather variable.) I also implemented Eugene's idea of time scales modelling Unix time with the discontinuities at leap seconds. I already had an interface for linear counts of seconds, so this just slots in. I also implemented the leading proposed calendar for Mars in the module Date::Darian::Mars, which is on CPAN. That should plug right into the experimental code. (I haven't actually tried it.) So I've now got parallel sets of day counts for Terra and Mars. There are some people already tracking time on Titan (and there's a Darian calendar for it), so there might already be a day count system there. Obviously we're going to get such systems on many many planets and moons. On some moons we'll want to count rotations relative to the planet, as well as (or instead of) rotations relative to Sol. There's also sidereal days to consider, which we have a canonical count for on Earth (Earth Rotation Angle). We use the 24:60:60 clock for subdivisions of all of these types of day (at least so far), although we handle the integer parts in completely different ways. I think some factoring is in order. -zefram
