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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."
Why? Changing the length of such a fundemental unit of time (other than one Planck unit of time) without changing its name is sure to cause confusion.
Not to mention, each measure of time will have to multiplied by a number not very much greater or smaller than 1, possibly causing precision problems, in order to convert it between Earth seconds and Mars seconds.
While I applaud the effort to make it easier to count time on Mars - I think, that in the bigger picture, it is not a good idea to use different fundemental units of time.
Even in the Clarke's 3001, the Ganymedes ignored the local time and measured the time in Earth units. If I recall correctly, they measured time with respect to UTC on Earth, completely ignoring local time.
A day thats still 24 hours long, but 39 minutes longer than an earth day? Is that Earth or Mars minutes now? We have enough problems (rockets blowing up etc.) caused by converting between the dissimilar metric and imperial units - who exactly thought redefining minutes and seconds to be slightly longer on mars was a good idea? Thats going to lead to something very expensive.
A day on Mars, which is known as a "sol," consists of 24 hours, just like a day on Earth. Each hour contains 60 minutes; each minute 60 seconds. There's nothing magical about that. Scientists simply got together and declared it to be so. But there's a catch. A martian second is a smidge longer than what you're used to on Earth. Think of it this way: Instead of counting, "One Mississippi, two Mississippi" count "One Mississippis, two Mississippis."
yes, because redefining the basic elements by which we measure time is SOOOOO much simpler than making a Martian day 24 hours and 40 minutes long...
A meter is defined as distanced traveled by light in a vaccum in an amount of time, is a meter longer on mars now?
> our natural body clock cycle is 25-26 hours,
:)
> making the adjustment to "Mars time" rather
> painless.
Painless - assuming, that is, that NASA have the technology to produce a localized variation in the hours of daylight...
And have you ever tried to order out for pizza at 9am (Earth time)? Not even Stephen Hawking has a fix for that one.
These sigs are more interesting tha
I wonder what comparable effects (2 moons?) on Mars have led to both planets having similar days.
Or, is this just how the Designers planned this particular planetary system?
The Law of Falling Bodies
Which bit of "exam week" implies fun? ;)
Of course, calendars do not lend themselves to base 10, but neither do they lend themselves to base 12 or base 60. In any event, that is no reason that basic temporal units, such as are used in physics (meters/second^2, etc) shouldn't be in the same base as the rest of our scientific units.
There's plenty of reason. Scientists prefer their choice of units to most naturally reflect the environment in which they're working. Kelvin is a more natural temperature scale for fundamental work, but Celsius, with 0 as freezing and 100 as boiling, is more natural in situations where water is important (like cooking and going outside). Particle physicists have one unit, the eV, which measures time, length, mass, etc. This wouldn't be particularly useful for measuring travel distance.
"86.4 ks from now" is not a useful way of refering to the same time tomorrow. This problem becomes much worse when you need to refer to several days away, since 0.7776 Ms is a horrible way to refer to 9 days. You might make the argument that the "day" is artificially chosen and not useful for measurement, but you would be sadly mistaken. For quite a while, at least, human life on this planet will revolve around a daily cycle. The sun still somewhat regulates our sleeping, and thus our work schedules.
If you try to remedy the problem by simply choosing the day as a fundamental unit and discarding the second, then you still run into the exact same problem we're discussing when you go to another planet. And even without interplanetary travel, you still have a problem when it comes to discussing years. Seasonal change affects our lives a great deal, so there is still value in maintaining a unit of time for a year.
There are only two possible explanations for this phenomenon:
I'd say either one strongly implies that aliens have been seriously messing with us before the advent of civilization. There are certainly many mythological cosmologies that feature humans arriving from somewhere else -- are there any that could be taken to imply a change in the Earth's orbit?