Curiosity is a car-sized robotic rover that was sent out to explore the Gale Crater1 on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. The rover was launched from Cape Canaveral2 on November 26, 2011 aboard the MSL spacecraft and landed on Aeolis Palus3 in the Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012. As of today (June 20, 2016), Curiosity has been on Mars for 1377 sols (1414 days).
The term sol is used by planetary astronomers to refer to the duration of a solar day on Mars. A mean Martian solar day — or sol — is 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds.
The point in time when a spacecraft lander hits the Mars surface is used as a reference point to determine the duration of the mission. This reference point is called "Sol 0", so that the number of elapsed Martian days (sols) can be tracked using a simple numerical count.
Input
A positive integer that expresses a number of Martian days (sols).
Output
The given number of sols expressed in Earth solar days, hours, minutes and seconds. This conversion must equal 1 sol with 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds. The exact output format can be derived from the example given below. All values that occur in the formatted output must be expressed as integers, and the number of seconds must be expressed as an integer by simply dropping the decimal digits.
Example
Input:
1377Output:
1377 sols = 1414 days, 20 hours, 31 minutes and 23 secondsEpilogue
The word yestersol was coined by the NASA Mars operations team early during the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission to refer to the previous sol (the Mars version of yesterday), and came into fairly wide use within that organization during the Mars Exploration Rover Mission of 2003. It was even picked up and used by the press. Other neologisms include tosol (for today on Mars), as well as one of three Mars versions of tomorrow: nextersol, morrowsol, or solmorrow. NASA planners coined the term soliday at least as far back as 2012 to refer to days off due to time phasing or the syncing of planetary schedules. After the recent globalization of the festival4, however, it remains to be seen when the first edition of Solmorrowland will be held on Mars.
