Living on Mars Time

Roland Piquepaille writes "When NASA's rovers, 'Spirit' and 'Opportunity,' touch down on Mars next January, scientists and engineers in charge of the missions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will start to experiment with a 90-day period of jet lag. Why? Because, as reports Astrobiology Magazine, 'a day on Mars is 39.5 minutes longer than a day on Earth.' To accommodate the requirements of interplanetary communication, during the mission the Spirit science and engineering teams will have to live on Mars time, in synch with the red planet's cycle of light and dark. This means that, here on Earth, they'll sometimes be working during daylight hours, and at other times they'll be working through the night. This summary contains more details and a screenshot of the Mars24 application, a Java program which gives you the time on Mars."

Comments

25-26 Hour Sleep Cycle

[davidstrauss]

I don't see how this would be a problem. Several credible reports exist that say our natural body clock cycle is 25-26 hours, making the adjustment to "Mars time" rather painless.

Re:25-26 Hour Sleep Cycle

[sklib]

The hours of daylight only matter if you have a window in your office, and depend on that for lighting. Almost every enginering lab I've been in was buried in the middle of a huge building, with maybe a row of covered windows on one side. To make it seem like "work-time", all they have to do is keep the lights on.

Also, if they expect engineers to work at weird hours of the night, surely they will also keep a couple of people around in the cafeteria to cook pizza. And when all else fails, there's always hot pockets. Besides, all the NASA people have probably gone through this sort of schedule-shifting in college, so I'm sure they know all the tricks.

On the subject of Mars...

[Aardpig]

...lets not forget that the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission has almost reached the red planet, and that the British-built Beagle 2 probe onboard will be touching down on Christmas Day, to begin its search for life. I for one am very excited!

Re:On the subject of Mars...

[calibanDNS]

The Mars24 application lets you mark several 'Martian landmarks' on the map that it provides. This includes the Beagle 2's landing sight. I don't see Mars Express in the list, but the Jar includes an XML document of the landmarks, so if they've done their job you simply need to add entries to the XML document.

On a similar note, looking at the contents of the Mars24 app reveals classes named EarthTime, MarsTime, and TitanTime. So, I'm wondering why they didn't include the functionality to let us monitor Titan time as well.

Re:25 hour cycle?

[Anonymous Coward]

These experiments were found to be invalid, because the people were given the ability to change the light level (ie there were dimmer switches on the bulbs). The bright artificial light was resetting their internal clocks to a longer day. A repeat of the experiment in constant dim lighting gave the result that people naturally live a 24-hour day.

Time Slip

[Dr. Hok]

I wonder when they'll adopt the 'time slip' as suggested by Kim Stanley Robinson in 'Red Mars':
The day has 24 'official' hours; the 39+ extra minutes are, well, extra: party time!

Re:Time Slip

[gobbo]

You need to go back and read the trilogy [you don't have to read it carefully to get this]. There is much ado about the complicated economic relationships driving the development of terraforming [not just some boneheaded sense of capitalism vs. socialism], and frequent reference to the unprecedented expense of these mega-mega-projects. There is no "optimistic assumption" that terraforming is without effort, quite the contrary. It's described as the most expensive and difficult human endeavour ever undertaken, made easier by automation and new technologies, but massive nonetheless. The cost of all this is borne out by the long view of the organizations involved. You were perhaps mislead by quirky characters like Russell who are so focussed on their jobs that the politics and economics ennabling their work are alien to them, and that obvious failing is a significant bit of character development.

The most pertinent references to capitalism and the "metanationals" of the time are explorations of trends like conglomeration, client states, and neo-syndicates. At the time the book was written, one division of Mitsubishi had a larger economy than Indonesia, and very little literature, even SF, explores issues like this. Alternative economies being explored by those under some kind of economic yoke is a history enshrined in the American past. So why is it inane? Because some of the influential characters are foaming-at-the-mouth pinkos and libertarians? Eco-economics is much less described in the series than issues of history and memory, or many of its other epic themes, but it's relevant to ideas of how frontiers involve developing new economics.

I'm interested in your examples of speculative fiction of the near future where political extrapolation/exploration is not inane.

"Ideology is like halitosis: it's something someone else has." [Paraphrasing Eagleton]

Re:Oh, those poor guys

[mwood]

ISTR experiments done years ago (spending months living underground, away from the influence of daylight) which showed that the human circadian rhythm free-runs at a period of about 26 hours, so maybe 24.66 hours is not too bad.

OTOH it could be a life-changing experience for some of them. Some people are more sensitive to the light/dark cycle than others. (See SAD, people who need melatonin supplements to get normal sleep in some parts of the year, etc.)

A simple solution

[AndroidCat]

Just sleep in an extra 39 minutes every morning. It works for me!

Re:Sounds like a crazy idea

[MCZapf]

That definition is about four decades out-of-date. The official SI definition is currently this:

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

The reason for this definition is that the old one was too imprecise. See Base unit definitions: Second.

Kim Stanley Robinson had a cool idea

[WhiteDragon]

Kim Stanley Robinson, in his books Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, had a really interesting system. Instead of keeping a 24 hour day and gradually getting out of sync w/ daylight, they add a 39 minute long "second" at midnight.

Submariners have been doing it

[MikeMo]

for years and years. The folks that man our nuclear subs live on an 18-hour cycle. For example, they get up a 7AM, stand watch from 8AM until 2PM, eat, shower (sometimes!), conduct maintenance, get some sleep, and then get up at 1AM. Then they stand watch from 2AM until 8AM, and so on. They do this for 2-3 months at a time.

Let me tell you, you get really, really tired at the end of this!

RTFA?

[CXI]

A) Complaints about redefining the second:
Days, seconds minutes, etc are all based on SOLAR cycles. We aren't redefining them, Mars' rotation is! We use UTC as that standard time unit and UTC is well defined, but it isn't linked to solar cycles on Mars so it's useless to keep track of Martian days with.

B) Complaints about why:
Read the article. The rover can only transmit at a time of day when the sun is up and Earth is in the sky. That is the same time of day on Mars every Martian day, but on Earth, due to the differences in rotation, shifts 39.5 minutes later each Earth day (no jokes please, you know what I mean). All NASA is saying is that mission controllers will need to do their jobs 39.5 minutes later each day because that's when the probe with be transmitting. It's not that hard to figure out! Yeesh.

Re:Good idea off-planet, bad idea at home

[dillon_rinker]

Actually, we go through 13 lunar cycles in a year. The calendar year is more easily measured on the basis of solar events - the equinox and the solstice. The year is thus naturally divided into four seasons. Each of these seasons then contains a little more than three lunar cycles. So the year isn't based on 12 lunar cycles but four seasons of about three cycles each.

Minutes and seconds go back to the Babylonians and their base-60 (sexagesimal) numbering system. We don't really know why they used a base 60 system, but we use minutes, seconds, and hours for entirely historical reasons.