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NASA's Spirit Rover Crew Are 'Slaves To Mars'

Posted by timothy on from the absolute-mars-corrupts-absolutely dept.

Quirk writes "The Telegraph has a bit on the challenge faced by the 280 team members who have had to leave Earth time behind and attune their circadian clock to the Mars solar day or 'sol'. '...the team's wake-up times and meal times two weeks after the landing will have shifted by nine hours.'"

5 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Damn Lag! by Prien715 · · Score: 2, Informative

    One thing a lot of people don't realize is that the communication lag between mars and earth is over 30 minutes. Imagine trying to play quake with that kind of lag.

    --
    -- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
    1. Re:Damn Lag! by ThatTallGuy · · Score: 2, Informative
      That's 8 minutes, not eight seconds. Refer here.

      AU: Astronomical Unit, defined as the radius of the Earth's orbit, appprox 93M miles. Used for convenience and because when you get such large values that change all the time, people get sloppy. :)

      Mars' orbit is ~1.6 AU from the sun. (See Bode's Law.) This means that Mars can be as little as 0.6 AU's or as much as 2.6 AU's depending on where the planets are in their orbits relative to one another. Communication times therefore would range from about 4-5 mins to 20+, one-way.

      The spacecraft are relatively slow to travel, since they coast the whole way. The path they take is a long leisurely curve so that less rocket fuel is required. There's a good animation of the path at Nasa (MPG, MOV.) So the timing of the launches is chosen for when the locations of Mars and Earth give the easiest launch (least energy required) and communications is secondary.

      Hope this helps.

  2. ITYM 8 light-MINUTES. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    1 AU / c = 8.31675359 minutes.

  3. Re:I wanna Mars Watch! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Not as handy as a watch, but there is a MarsClock written for PalmOS.

    http://marsclock.sourceforge.net/
    Open source, too.

    --
    Eeyore

  4. Shift workers are used to this by skware · · Score: 3, Informative

    I worked as a shiftworker for the last 11 months. These were 12 hour shifts, 7am-7pm or 7pm-7am, 2 days followed by two nights followed by 4 days off. To work my sleep best I'd sleep 7 times every 8 days or effectively increase my days by about 3.5 hours per day. I got out of that job recently but have found that my circadian rhythm hasn't returned to normal yet (It's 3am here atm)