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

Woot

[christurkel]

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!

Re:Woot

[turbosk]

I'm just coming home from a third shift right now, and as long as you get enough sleep, 3rd shift really isn't that bad. Having said that from personal experience, it's also true that many/most of the world's largest industrial accidents happen on the late night/overnight shifts.

I think it would be even easier to adjust to a longer Mars day since sleep studies have found that, given no time cues, the human body naturally drifts into a 25-hour cycle, or circadian rhythm. (No backing evidence in this post, go lookitup yerseff.)

going to bed now, to sleep, perchance to dream.....
fred

25 hour cycle?

[Tomahawk]

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...

Re:25 hour cycle?

[boogy nightmare]

Actually, i think its more like a 28 hour cycle, i go caving a lot and when you stay down for several days (think camping but underground) you definatly change to 28 when you dont have to alter your clock for night and day.

Re:well.....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Find people with longer circadian cycles

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:does it matter all that much?

[swordboy]

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?

mixed solar and lunar cycles

[peter303]

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.

Radio astronomers have done this for years

[Urban Garlic]

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.

As handled in KSR's "Red Mars"

[RevAaron]

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.