Marian Protocol v1.0 — Normative Specification, Reference Implementation and Conformance Package

Abstract

Marian Protocol v1.0 is an open, machine-readable and independently testable civil calendar specification designed for sustained human settlement on Mars. It defines a complete operational framework for Martian dates, calendar arithmetic, interoperability and software implementation. Marian uses 12 months comprising 24 minths, with 668- and 669-sol years governed by a deterministic intercalation rule. Its civil-week architecture deliberately permits shortened terminal weeks, maintaining regular month and minth boundaries without omitting any physical sol. The protocol distinguishes the continuous passage of time from the civil calendar used to organise settlement life. This normative release includes: The complete Marian Protocol v1.0 technical specification. Calendar arithmetic, date representation and machine-readable conventions. Python and JavaScript reference implementations. Conformance datasets, test fixtures and independent verification tools. Governance, provenance, licensing and implementation documentation. Three explanatory technical companions covering the protocol, evidence and prior art, and comparison with the Darian calendar. The release contains 86 files, corresponding exactly to commit 19ce1850b66b34ea76dc09296d8b4d95133737fc in the public Marian GitHub repository. The calendar's computational rules have undergone automated conformance testing, including a 66,859-sol century-scale validation. Independent high-precision SPICE verification remains outstanding, and the future settlement-era founding epoch has not yet been instantiated. No institutional adoption or official Martian calendar designation is claimed. Licensing: Original technical documentation and data are provided under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), while original reference implementations and testing software are provided under Apache License 2.0. Individual file licensing and third-party exclusions are documented within the archive. This release is distinct from the previously published Marian research preprint (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22687143) and computational reproducibility package (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22686413). The separately published illustrated book, Marian: An Operating Calendar for Human Mars, by JB Bullock, is available at https://iamjbcom.github.io/marian/. The book and its illustrations remain separately copyrighted and are not included in this technical archive. Author: Jonathan Bullock, Independent Researcher, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. ORCID: 0009-0009-2044-5043 Version: 1.0