time-converter 1.2.0

A Python class that allows for convenient conversion between different date and time formats/units

time_converter

A Python class that allows for convenient conversion between different date and time formats and units. The library supports both general-purpose Earth-based time units (such as Python's datetime type, Day-of-year or POSIX time) as well as time units useful for working with data from the Mars Science Laboratory and Chang'e 4 space missions. It can be easily extended to support additional units.

Installation

pip3 install time_converter

Yes, it's that simple.

Usage

from time_converter import Time

Time(2019.5, 'decimalyear').to('dt')
# > datetime.datetime(2019, 7, 2, 12, 0)

you can also supply list-like objects as input, the output will be a numpy array.

Time([2018.0, 2018.1], 'decimalyear').to('dt')
# > array([datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 1, 0, 0),
#          datetime.datetime(2019, 2, 6, 11, 59, 59, 999997)], dtype=object)

Supported units

Earth-based time units

Unit	Example	Name	Abbreviated Name
Python datetime (UTC)	datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 1, 0, 0)	datetime	dt
DoY Tuple (year, day of year)	(2019, 1.0)	doy
Decimal year	2019.0	decimalyear	dy
POSIX time	1546300800	posix

Mars Science Laboratory

The MSL spacecraft clock (sclk) measures the number of seconds since January 1 2000, 11:58:55.816 UTC. However, due to drifting of the clock, some corrections need to be applied based on files supplied by NASA, which this tool uses to do the conversion between sclk and other units.

Unit	Example	Name
MSL mission sol	2276.8306983767375	sol
MSL spacecraft clock	599570768.5720837	sclk

Chang'E 4

For Chang'E 4, the conversion of spacecraft clock time to datetime has already implemented, so it does not need to be included in time_converter. But we have implemented a converter for the lunar day number and local solar time at Chang'E 4's landing site:

Unit	Example	Name
Local solar time at Chang'E 4	1, datetime.time(7, 32, 30)	ce4lst