Technical specification

SOLE: A Universal Temporal Reference Standard for Human Space Operations.

Version 2 · June 2026 · Adam Wolarczuk

Live SOLE

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SOLE is a universal temporal reference standard that expresses any moment as a single, unambiguous timestamp readable identically on Earth, in orbit, on the Moon, and on Mars. Where UTC is Earth-centric — tied to Earth's rotation and expressed through local time zones — SOLE uses a continuous count from a fixed epoch anchored to the beginning of the human space age. The result is a coordinate system for time that scales from a mission control room in Houston to a rover on the Martian surface without conversion, ambiguity, or timezone arithmetic.

1. The Problem

Human space operations today are coordinated across a patchwork of incompatible local time references. NASA's Johnson Space Center operates on Central Time (UTC−5/−6). Roscosmos headquarters runs on Moscow Standard Time (UTC+3). ESA's ESOC in Darmstadt observes Central European Time (UTC+1). JAXA's Tsukuba centre operates on Japan Standard Time (UTC+9). The ISS uses UTC as a common crew reference, but no surface timezone maps onto orbital mechanics.

When operations extend beyond Earth orbit, the problem compounds. A Mars rover sol is 88,775 seconds — 2.75% longer than an Earth day. The lunar day spans approximately 708 Earth hours. No local time system applies on either surface. Missions currently resolve this with ad hoc per-mission timekeeping (Mars Coordinated Time, mission-elapsed time counters) that are incompatible with each other and untranslatable without conversion tables.

As multi-agency, multi-destination missions become the operational norm — Artemis, Mars Sample Return, commercial lunar transport, deep space relay constellations — the absence of a universal temporal reference becomes a coordination liability. SOLE addresses this directly.

2. The SOLE Standard

2.1 Epoch

SOLE counts from 04 October 1957, 00:00:00 UTC — the date Sputnik I launched and the human space age began. This is SOLE Day 1. All dates prior to this point are pre-epoch archival records and carry no SOLE stamp.

The Sputnik epoch was selected because it is precise and historically unambiguous (a single known moment, not a calendrical convention), culturally and operationally meaningful (the start of all human space activity), and independent of any national, religious, or geopolitical calendar system.

2.2 Structure: Cycle · Day · Fraction

A SOLE timestamp takes the form Cycle : Day : Fraction — for example, 6:3156:0.3065.

Cycle — approximately 10 Earth years (3,652.5 days). Cycle 0 began with Sputnik I in 1957. The current Cycle 6 began in 2017.

Cycle	Period	Key events
0	1957 – 1967	Sputnik, Gagarin, Mercury, Gemini
1	1967 – 1977	Apollo 11 Moon landing, Skylab, Voyager launch
2	1977 – 1987	Space Shuttle Columbia STS-1
3	1987 – 1997	Hubble launch, Mir operations
4	1997 – 2007	ISS construction begins, Mars Odyssey
5	2007 – 2017	Curiosity lands on Mars, New Horizons Pluto flyby
6	2017 – 2027 (current)	JWST, Artemis I, Perseverance, Starship IFT series

Day — the numbered day within the current cycle, counting from 1 to 3,652. Resets to 1 at the start of each new cycle.

Fraction — the fraction of the current UTC day elapsed, expressed to four decimal places. 0.0000 is midnight UTC. 0.5000 is noon. 0.9999 is the final second before midnight. Independent of local timezone and independent of planetary day length.

2.3 Calculation

EPOCH = 1957-10-04T00:00:00Z CYCLE = 3652.5 days td = (datetime_utc − EPOCH) / 86,400,000 ← total days elapsed cycle = floor(td / CYCLE) day = floor(((td mod CYCLE) + CYCLE) mod CYCLE) + 1 fraction = (UTC_hours × 3600 + UTC_minutes × 60 + UTC_seconds) / 86,400 SOLE = "{cycle}:{day}:{fraction:.4f}"

The calculation requires only UTC input and basic arithmetic. No timezone tables, no leap second handling beyond what UTC already provides, no planetary calendar lookups.

2.4 Precision

Standard precision uses four decimal places (e.g. 6:3156:0.3065), representing resolution of approximately 8.64 seconds per unit. Scientific precision extends to eight decimal places (e.g. 6:3156:0.30650347), providing sub-millisecond resolution for telemetry, synchronisation, and archival applications.

3. Historical Anchor Points

The following events are permanently placed on the SOLE timeline, providing historical weight and cross-reference anchors for mission planners, archivists, and operations teams.

Event	Earth Date (UTC)	SOLE	Note
Sputnik I Launch	04 Oct 1957	0:1:0.0000	SOLE Day 1. The space age begins.
Yuri Gagarin — First Human in Space	12 Apr 1961	—	First human to orbit Earth. Vostok 1.
Apollo 11 Moon Landing	20 Jul 1969	—	First crewed lunar landing. Sea of Tranquility.
Space Shuttle Columbia STS-1	12 Apr 1981	—	First Space Shuttle launch. Crewed.
ISS Zarya Module Launch	20 Nov 1998	—	ISS construction begins. Proton-K, Baikonur.
Curiosity Lands on Mars	06 Aug 2012	—	Mars Science Laboratory. Gale Crater.
Artemis I Launch	16 Nov 2022	—	First SLS launch. Uncrewed lunar flyby.

Apollo 11 reads as Cycle 1, Day 656, fraction 0.8451 — 84.51% of the UTC day elapsed, placing the landing shortly before 21:00 UTC. Use the Converter to place any date on the SOLE timeline.

4. Cross-Context Reference

A core design requirement of SOLE is that the same value reads identically across every operating environment. The SOLE stamp in the final column below updates live every second.

Reference point	Type	UTC offset	SOLE (live)	Note
NASA Johnson Space Center	Agency	UTC−5	—	Houston, TX. Central Time.
Roscosmos HQ, Moscow	Agency	UTC+3	—	Moscow Standard Time.
ESA ESOC, Darmstadt	Agency	UTC+1	—	Central European Time.
JAXA Tsukuba	Agency	UTC+9	—	Japan Standard Time.
ISS Orbital	Orbital	UTC	—	No surface timezone. Crew references UTC.
Lunar Surface	Lunar	—	—	No local time zones. SOLE is the only stable reference.
Mars (MTC)	Interplanetary	—	—	Sol is ~88,775 s. SOLE is the cross-context anchor.

5. Operational Applications

5.1 Mission Operations

Launch window coordination across agencies, continents, and time zones collapses to a single shared stamp. Every team reads the same SOLE value identically. No conversion layer required at agency boundaries. Pre-launch briefings, go/no-go decision points, and post-launch event logging all reference one unambiguous coordinate.

5.2 Deep Space and Interplanetary Missions

At interplanetary distances, signal delay means local time on a spacecraft is operationally meaningless relative to Earth clocks. Mission elapsed time counters are mission-specific and non-portable. SOLE provides a reference independent of Earth location and the planet the mission is operating near. A log entry stamped in SOLE is interpretable by any future reader without knowledge of the specific mission's internal timekeeping conventions.

5.3 Archival and AI Systems

Temporal indexing for scientific observatories, mission archives, and AI systems requires a reference readable across decades and centuries. UTC-based records require knowledge of historical timezone rules and leap second tables to interpret correctly. SOLE timestamps are self-contained: the calculation requires only the epoch and basic arithmetic. An archivist in 2150 can decode a SOLE stamp without reference to any external table.

5.4 Multi-Agency Coordination

As Artemis, Mars Sample Return, and commercial lunar transport bring together NASA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO, and commercial operators, the timezone coordination overhead at mission boundaries is a real cost. SOLE eliminates the conversion step entirely. A SOLE timestamp in a joint operations document is unambiguous regardless of which agency authored it.

6. Why Not UTC?

UTC is the correct standard for Earth-surface timekeeping. SOLE does not compete with UTC for that purpose. The limitations of UTC for space operations are structural:

Earth-rotation dependency. UTC is defined by Earth's rotation. It has no natural interpretation off-Earth.
Timezone expression. UTC is almost never communicated as UTC — it is expressed through local offsets that require conversion at every agency boundary.
Leap seconds. UTC incorporates leap seconds to track Earth's irregular rotation, introducing discontinuities in continuous time series and requiring lookup tables to handle correctly in software.
No space-age anchor. UTC begins at 01 Jan 1900 — a date with no relevance to space operations. There is no natural mapping from UTC to the history of human spaceflight.

SOLE addresses all four: rotation-independent, expressed as a single value with no timezone layer, continuous count without leap second adjustments, and anchored directly to the event that started human space operations.

7. Comparison: SOLE vs. Existing Standards

The following table compares SOLE against the timekeeping standards currently used in space operations.

Property	SOLE	UTC	MET Mission Elapsed Time	MTC Mars Coordinated Time
Earth-independent	✓	✗	✓	✓
Universal (works on Moon, Mars, deep space)	✓	✗	Partial	✗ Mars only
Continuous from fixed epoch	✓ (Sputnik I, 1957)	Partial (leap seconds)	✗ Per-mission reset	✗ Per-mission reset
No timezone conversion required	✓	✗	✓	✓
Human-readable decade scale	✓ (Cycles)	✓ (calendar year)	✗	✗
Portable across missions	✓	✓	✗	✗
Calculation requires external tables	No	Leap second table	No	No
Historical space-age context	✓ (epoch = Sputnik)	✗	✗	✗
Sub-second resolution	✓ (8 dp mode)	✓	✓	✓

MET = Mission Elapsed Time (per-mission counter, resets at launch). MTC = Mars Coordinated Time (Mars-surface only, sol-based). ✓ = supported · ✗ = not supported · Partial = limited support.

8. Implementation Examples

SOLE requires no external libraries or network calls. The following minimal implementations demonstrate the core calculation in common languages.

Python

from datetime import datetime, timezone EPOCH = datetime(1957, 10, 4, tzinfo=timezone.utc) CYCLE = 3652.5 def sole(dt: datetime, precision: int = 4) -> str: td = (dt - EPOCH).total_seconds() / 86400 cycle = int(td // CYCLE) day = int(((td % CYCLE) + CYCLE) % CYCLE) + 1 frac = (dt.hour * 3600 + dt.minute * 60 + dt.second) / 86400 return f"{cycle}:{day}:{frac:.{precision}f}" # Example now = datetime.now(timezone.utc) print(sole(now)) # → e.g. 6:3156:0.3065 print(sole(now, 8)) # → 6:3156:0.30650347 (scientific) # Apollo 11 landing apollo = datetime(1969, 7, 20, 20, 17, 0, tzinfo=timezone.utc) print(sole(apollo)) # → 1:656:0.8451

JavaScript

Both implementations produce identical output. No external dependencies. Input must be UTC; local time conversion is the caller's responsibility.

9. Live Platform

SOLE v2 is implemented as a live web reference platform. All tools are publicly accessible.

Converter

Tool

Input any Earth date (UTC or local timezone) and receive the full SOLE stamp with Cycle / Day / Fraction breakdown. Supports pre-epoch records.

Reference Table

Live

The current SOLE moment across all major agency locations, the ISS, lunar surface, and Mars — updating every second.

Mission Calendar

Live API

Launch data from The Space Devs Launch Library 2. NASA, SpaceX, ESA, JAXA, ISRO, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and more — each timestamped in SOLE.

Timeline

History

Real space milestones from Sputnik I to Artemis I, permanently placed on the SOLE timeline.

Active Spacecraft Registry

Reference

Every known active mission grouped by location — Earth orbit, lunar orbit, Mars orbit, Mars surface, deep space — with SOLE launch timestamps.

ISS Live Position

Live

Real-time altitude, velocity, lat/lon, visibility, and crew count updated every 5 seconds via the wheretheiss.at API.

Appendix A — Quick Reference

Component	Value
Epoch	04 Oct 1957, 00:00:00 UTC
Cycle length	3,652.5 days (~10 years)
Current cycle	Cycle 6 (2017 – 2027)
Day range	1 – 3,652 per cycle
Fraction range	0.0000 → 0.9999
Standard precision	4 dp (~8.64 s/unit)
Scientific precision	8 dp (sub-ms)
Apollo 11	1:656:0.8451
Artemis I	—
Current SOLE	—

EPOCH = 1957-10-04T00:00:00Z CYCLE = 3652.5 td = (utc − EPOCH).days cycle = floor(td / CYCLE) day = floor( ((td % CYCLE) + CYCLE) % CYCLE ) + 1 frac = utc_seconds / 86400 SOLE = f"{cycle}:{day}:{frac:.4f}"

Appendix B — Code Samples

See Section 8 for full annotated implementations in Python and JavaScript. Both produce identical output and require no external dependencies.

Appendix C — How to Cite SOLE

When referencing SOLE in technical documents, academic papers, or operational specifications, use the following citation format:

APA

Wolarczuk, A. (2026). SOLE: A Universal Temporal Reference Standard for Human Space Operations (Version 2). AYVAtech IT Solutions. https://ayvatech.com.au/whitepaper.html

IEEE

A. Wolarczuk, "SOLE: A Universal Temporal Reference Standard for Human Space Operations," ver. 2, AYVAtech IT Solutions, Jun. 2026. [Online]. Available: https://ayvatech.com.au/whitepaper.html

BibTeX

@techreport{sole2026, author = {Wolarczuk, Adam}, title = {SOLE: A Universal Temporal Reference Standard for Human Space Operations}, year = {2026}, month = {6}, version = {2}, institution = {AYVAtech IT Solutions}, url = {https://ayvatech.com.au/whitepaper.html} }

Appendix D — Version History

v2.0 Jun 2026 Initial public release. Live web platform launched. Missions calendar, ISS live tracking, active spacecraft registry, and Converter added. White paper published.
v1.0 May 2026 Internal specification. Core epoch, cycle structure, and calculation formula defined. Reference table and timeline prototyped.

Intellectual Property — SOLE is proprietary intellectual property created by Adam Wolarczuk, © 2026. The temporal reference standard, naming conventions, cycle structure, epoch selection, and associated software implementation are all original works. No reproduction, extraction, reverse engineering, or commercial use is permitted without written permission. Contact: [email protected]