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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."
Have these people never had to work to a deadline before ???
:)
two words for them
JOLT COLA
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"Oh."
A Java Application to display martian time? That sounds like a Java 101 excersise :)
Although the screenshots do look pretty neat.
Which is, of course, totally and completely different from what we do as computer people.
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a day on Mars is 39.5 minutes longer than a day on Earth.
Great. This is a project-planner's fantasy. Forget offshore, we should move our software projects off-planet.
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...
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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?
Well, that dratted "24/7" slogan is definitely doomed on Mars.
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
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...
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.
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.
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