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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."
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.
...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!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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.
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!
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
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.)
The reason for this definition is that the old one was too imprecise. See Base unit definitions: Second.
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.