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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."
Developed on Mac OS X. Cool! Seriously though, it will be interesting to see the engineers adjust to an ever changing schedule. And I thought 3rd shift was bad!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I once heard that, in test, the human body operates on a 25 hour cycle anyway, and we 'reset' our internal clocks ever day to fit in with the 24 hours of a day.
IIRC, tests were carried out where volunteers lived underground with no access to the outside world - no TV, windows, etc. They could call up to the surface to request books, games, food, but nothing that would allow them to work out any sence of time (no clocks either!). It was found that they reverted to a 25 hour day...
Shouldn't be too difficult for the scientists, or for colonization...
it is much cheaper and easier to aquire your daily caffeine in pill form. I bought a bottle of 1000 pills of 100mg caffeine for $30 USD. Two pills is equivalent to 2 cups of coffee. When combined with other legal stimulants, you can get through exams week quite nicely.
Not everyone has a body clock that runs on an exact 24 hour cycle. Some people's circadian rhythms run as fast as 23 hours/cycle, some as slow as 25 hrs/cycle. JPL could test its employees for their natural cycle. A few days in a sleep test chamber quickly show which people tend to get up earlier and earlier each day vs. those that get up later and later. Then, they could selectively use people whose body clock matches that of Mars. Of course, I would still pity the families of the people that are on Mars time.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
does it matter all that much?
I would be very curious about the implications on aging. I mean, is the physical age of one's body related to the solar cycle?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I know that pet owners of iguanas often accelerate the "solar cycle" to end shedding earlier. I have no idea if it affects humans the same way.
It's clearly more complicated than an introductory Java assignment, but it does show some interesting behavior.
For instance the programmer uses checkbox menu items where selecting them constructs their respective windows, but unchecking them does absolutely nothing.
Also if you go to the "Graphic Display" tab and select "Local Horizon" and then "Orbital Platform" the contents of the pane are not repainted properly.
Careful; "legal stimulants" stop being legal if it can be shown you're using them to have fun.
What that means is between the judge, the police and whatever doctor they pick as an 'expert witness'.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
Phobos and Diemos (the Martian moons) are both significantly smaller than our moon, so their effect on the planet is much less.
If you really want to think about a celestial coincidence, watch a solar eclipse. The fact that the angular dimensions of both the sun and moon from Earth are nearly identical (depending on orbital variations, you sometimes get annular eclipses, where a narrow ring of the sun is visible) has always entertained me. Especially when you consider that the moon's orbit is (very, very) slowly changing, and intelligent life is around at just the right time to appreciate the effect.
There have been lots of other posts about them changing the fundamental unit of time to do this, but what struck me is that they aren't using metric time. I would think that for a scientific endeavour such as this, where they are modifying the unit of time anyway, they would use a base-10 system instead of our current one.
I agree.
Frankly, given that we do all of our other work in base 10, I'm surprised scientists haven't used this as an opportunity to introduce a base-10 time system for mars (and the other planets as well).
1000 "metric seconds" (microsols) = 1 "metric minute" (millisol)
100 millisols = 1 "metric hour" (decisol)
10 decisols = 1 sol.
Convert between Martian time, Jupiter Time, Calliston Time, etc. via a simple coefficient (perhaps defined such that 1.0 yields earth standard time in base-10). Indeed, such a system could even be backported to the earth, should we ever have the desire. Given that the rest of our units of measure are in base 10, this makes perfect sense.
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.
In addition to the easier kitchen-math of using base 10 over base 60, this approach would have had the added advantage of not being so easilly confusing: no one is going to confuse a second with a microsol, be it a microsol on Mars, on Jupiter, on Io, or even on Earth, while a 'martian second' vs. a 'terran second' is bound to sow all kinds of confusion over the next few generations.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You don't even have to live underground to experience this. I work for myself, and have a flexible schedule as a result. My days are typically 18 hours long, and I usually get 8 hours of sleep every night. Do the math and you can see that things slide back an average of 2 hours every calendar day.
I get to see the entire range of my surroundings every two weeks - midnight, midday, etc. The biggest problem is trying to hit certain events scheduled by people on "normal" schedules, like jury duty. At some point you either have to stay up really late or wake up really early.
My office has walls that face north and east, and there's plenty of direct light in the mornings. There's so much that I have to put something in the way to keep the glare out of my face at this time of the year due to the alignment of the sun with my windows. So you can't say I'm living in a cave - there are plenty of light cues here. I just don't seem to be affected by them.
The moon and its tides repeat on a 24 hour 48 minute periodicty. That could explain the 25 hour period in absence of light.
Its biologically useful to have multiple clocks. This spreads out activity cycles, so that short period disaster, e.g. predator, wont wipe out everyone.
During my thesis write-up I was basically working as much as I could before dropping dead. My day cycle went from 24 to 30 hours with a 20 hour working period followed by 10 hours sleep. I reckon I wasn't meant to live on this planet ;-)
Of course, there are some drawbacks... quite often I'd be eating pizza and watching the tellytubbies or some other crap on TV before going to bed at some crazy hour like 10AM, but sometimes I would show-up at the uni during "normal hours" even enjoying a pint or 2 with my mates after work. That day, I would just call "friday". Problem is, when your friday falls on a sunday, there aren't many mates to enjoy a pint after work... I guess there were "good" and "bad" fridays :-)
Did that for about 6 months until the viva. Took ages to go back into a 24 hour cycle and still now (2 years after) I have to be careful not to push it too much during weekends otherwise my sleep is basically screwed for the entire following week.
People talk about this as though it were a new requirement, but some astronomers have done this before. I was involved in a project which used the old 300 foot telescope at Green Bank, WVA, which was only moveable in "longitude" -- for "latitude", we had to wait for our target to pass overhead. This meant we worked on sidereal time, but the cafeteria stayed on mean solar time. It was only a few minutes a day difference, but it was still pretty disruptive.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
The only important factor in biological aging is degredation of DNA, or more specifically the loss of DNA Tollemerase. As cells go through more divisions and replications the little pieces that keep the strands of DNA packed start to break down, and when they get unraveled enough the cells own mechanisms realize that they are old and disfunctional and the cell suicides. By capping these Tallemerase sites scientists have been able to make mice that live up to ten times longer than normal!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
in his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Steven Johnson says that, for some reason, human's internal clock is based on a day 25 hours long. this clock is reset every morning when you wake up. this explains why i tend to get tired an hour later each day, until i force myself to correct it.
this would probably mean living on Mars would feel more natural than on Earth.
Ugh. Any other Slashdotters want to contribute/correct me, please do :)
This has been proposed many, many times for use here on Earth. The metric-heads went gangbusters over it when Canada converted to metric back in the 70s, and it never took off, for obvious reasons:
Of course, calendars do not lend themselves to base 10, but neither do they lend themselves to base 12 or base 60
This here is the key. Our calender is (more or less) based on a logical observation of regular cyclical events in the sky. Our 12 months come from the cycle of the moon, of which we go through approximately 12 per year. The word "month" was originally "moonth", if you're curious. The problem, of course, is that nature didn't provide us with a nice 12 months of 30 days per month, so we have this hodepodge of units. We also don't have an exactly 365-day (which is base what, anyway?) year, but we manage, because measuring days is just about the most natural thing we can do.
As for minutes/seconds, this goes back to circular clock faces, and possibly sundials. I forget the exact mathematical reasoning behind it, but a circle just doesn't divide into base-100 nicely. Unless my professors just made this one up, or I'm remembering wrong, it's been a long time!
In short, the way we measure time is partly biological, and partly historical. I've managed to find pretty compelling reasons for most of it over the years, but yeah, like any measurement system, it's mostly arbitrary.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Why not just reprogram their clocks to stop for 39.5 minutes in the middle of the night, and let these hard-working people get some extra shut-eye?
Redefining the smaller units to compensate for a difference in the length of the longer ones is just so arbitrary. What about the difference in the length of the Martian year? Are they going to redefine the "week" to 13 days so that there are still (roughly) 52 of them in each year?
And then there's back-porting the length of a "month"... {pulls hair out}
I think some people may have no circadian cycles. I sleep a random number of hours, and am awake for a random number of hours each day.
This week's rough 'awake' hours have been like.. 32, 9, 29, 11, 17, 12.. and 'sleep' hours have been like.. 7, 4, 16, 11, 12, 6, 9.
I live quite easily in this situation (since I work for myself). Daylight appears to have no effect, unless I woke up at, say, 9pm.. in which case I usually have a wave of tiredness hit me when daylight comes.
Does this mean I have no rhythm, or a heavily distorted one?
mogorific carpentry experiments
I see, and how much coffee is one pill equivalent to?
As an aside, I prefer Penguin Mints. Approximately 14 mg each (3 mints = 1 can of Coke), so you get a much lower dose, but they're also some of the tastiest mints I've ever had, so I'd probably buy them even without the caffeine.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I always thought the way that this extra 40 minutes was handled in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) was great.I can't remember what they call that time period- but they just leave it off the clock. Every night at midnight, the transition from 12:00 AM to 12:01 AM takes 39.5 minutes rather than only 1. That way, you can go to bed later than you should've and still get a decent rest. :)
For any of you interested in Mars colonization, I highly reccomend the books. I've yet to read the last of the trilogy, but Red Mars was absolutely amazing. The second book was pretty good too, but it's hard to follow up something like the first. KSR portrays a very realistic near-future, and a lot of the technology it'd take in the book's version is already here. I think KSR serves on some various NASA committes regarding the future manned mission to Mars, etc.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Here is a GPL PalmPilot port I wrote of Mars24 (using the actual time code, just a different UI):
MarsClock.
Space and Computers.