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

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.'"

Comments

first?!

[Anonymous Coward]

YEAH BEEYOTCH!

Mars Time

[Henry V .009]

That explains things. I think I've been attuned to Mars time for a while now.

After all, it's not like my caffeine addiction could be affecting me.

Re:Mars Time

[Anonymous Coward]

That's OK...at least you won't get type-II diabetes

Re:Mars Time

[drinkypoo]

Jesus H Christ, mine's affecting me. I had two diet red bulls and a diet coke over the course of last evening and I kept waking myself up over the course of the night because I was sweating my arse off. Oh well, maybe it'll be like those swedish saran wrap weight loss programs. Or maybe I'll stop drinking caffeinated beverages after 3pm. Especially those which give you wings.

I for one

[!3ren]

I for one welcome our Martian Overlords

Challenge, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll forgive me for not shedding too many tears for these 'slaves to mars'. I'll save them for the real slaves: young children in poor asian countries who make shit like Kathie Lee Gifford's clothing line.

They are lucky if they even get meal times and don't much care if they get shifted by nine hours or not.

Let's get some perspective.

But that's probably not interesting enough for The Telegraph to run a story on.

Re:Challenge, huh?

[curious.corn]

Well yeah, strictly speaking it's off topic but I think it's also insightful. I believe scientific pursuit has to address whatever it feels interesting and is, in perspective, useful for the advancement of technic and pure knowledge. On the other hand, obtuse media coverage that is to scientific information like a circus show compared to a naturalistic report betrays profound callousness. I don't think anyone would be as excited driving through a desert road yet overnight everyone has become an eso-geologist... I'd prefer mass media to cover without pietism how the global community is/should fight to grab Africa out of the middle ages (and leave the Mars Explorations to good scientific journals, Nature, SciAm or Nat Geo for the beautiful imagery)... Now mod me down to -1

Re:Challenge, huh?

[BitGeek]

Actually, those kids aren't slaves. They're happy to have the work.

Funny thing is, you'd rather they starve than get to work for a living.

And as to the "slave wages" they are paid, this shows serious ignorance-- when you ignore cost of living adjustments and currency adjustments, you make it look like they are getting paid less than they need to survive.

The reason sweatshops are popular is that they offer a BETTER DEAL than the employment alternatives.

But american liberals, determined to make everyone in the world starve, just can't stand the idea-- they'd rather those people be unemployed because minimum wage is $20,000 a year than have them chose for themselves whats best for them.

Liberalism is anti-human rights.

Re:Challenge, huh?

[curious.corn]

Yours is a common argument amongst us westerners... it also has some logic within but our own success as a society debunks it. You see, here in Italy higher education and research are kept in very low consideration; many young people prefer to drop out of school to work in the "Made in Italy" industry. Apparently they seem to have a good deal with the wages earned they can afford uber cell phones, ridiculously aftermarketed cars, D. Beckham sportswear and sat TV football and disco club... They are being screwed and after a decade or so this logic is showing it's shortsightedness as the patrimony erodes. Today, our economy is more or less at a developing country's mercy, competing with underpaid (compared to our standards) labour, basically producing low tech gadgetry with little intrinsic value. We don't cultivate a competitive advantage, the whole world is catching up and will sooner or later leave us in the cold. What point am I trying to make? Well, while we are more or less conciously forfeigting our chances to keep the pace these kids sweating their lives in ratholes aren't getting their fair chance. There's no chance a country will improve if it coerces it's human resources into poor margin jobs; we are the living proof. So while those illiterate kids are pretty happy not to starve (but then wouldn't they be much happier if they had a school to attend or a childhood to play) they also suffer because their condition will likely never change in their lifetime and won't have enough income to bootstrap their descendancy's emancipation. For all practical purpouses they are medieval serfs... that's not nice and is cruel on our part to benefit from it.

Re:Challenge, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Al contrare.

Libterarians encourage such practices. Just look at the party platform.

http://www.lp.org/

Re:Challenge, huh?

[isorox]

Libertarian != liberals

Liberals are leftist whackjobs

Re:Challenge, huh?

[ajagci]

They are being screwed and after a decade or so this logic is showing it's shortsightedness as the patrimony erodes. Today, our economy is more or less at a developing country's mercy, competing with underpaid (compared to our standards) labour, basically producing low tech gadgetry with little intrinsic value.

Wealth breeds complacency, but as long as they get what they want out of life, why worry? Once it doesn't work anymore, their children will start taking education more seriously again because they'll realize that they have to.

I can understand when Americans whine about this sort of thing because they don't have the historical perspective, but Italy, in particular, has been through many cycles of this over the millennia, and Italians should really know better than to worry about it.

Re:Challenge, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

...whereas libertarians are simply unqualified whackjobs, right?

Re:Challenge, huh?

[curious.corn]

Historical perspective... yeah, bah... I'm not that shure about our historical perspective. Between the collapse of the roman empire and Italy's unification under the Savoia throne in the late '800 Italy has been the playground of local lords, foreign rulers and bickering nobility. No, against all efforts of our postfascist educational system to convice us of the contrary, Italy has stagnated for centuries. Even the industrial revolution took off late because of our campanilistic fragmentation. We never had a strong middle class and fascism came just in time to trounce any chance to develop one. After the war we sort of dedicated ourselves to survival and had some decent growth but the diffused cultural attitude shifted from "Reds Vs. Blue" class conflict to "Screw and when you're caught or screwed, whine" individualism. Only until recently nationalistic pride was deemed fascist (but we do have racist/secessionist party leaders in the government) but anyone save the most rabid reactionary is deemed a commie (can anyone beleive that over here government officials claim "The Economist" is sold out to the commies); industry reps routinely call names at anyone resisting the idea of legalizing sweatshops, most of our population can't care less because they never grew up as "middle-class" but jumped straight out of indigence into consumerism. Even what should be the "enlightened elite" only cares for the quick buck and literally sank all our major industries: IC, Chem, Metal. All that's left is media but it's not very healthy as one Mogul is conditioning it's development to his private convenience... the only developing industry over here is call-centres: low wage, cheap pseudo-butlery... do you really think we know better? ;-(

Re:Challenge, huh?

[BitGeek]

Jesus, its like you're channeling the little red book.

Please go learn some economics. Austrian economics is consistant with history, while socialist economists are always going around trying to justify why history doesn't fit their theories.

According to you, the USSR was a paradise!

Re:Challenge, huh?

[curious.corn]

What? Please tell me where am I rooting for the little red book. Nowhere am I condemning capitalism, actually I'm complaining that our lousy condition was caused by the lack of a strong middle class! Italian capitalism is limp, that's a fact and any economic commentator worth it's salt will agree with this statement. It doesn't depend on capitalism per se but it just happened because we never had a true, solid and modern market economy (neither for goods, nor stock) but rather a familistic, credit driven and state investment supported caste system. That our industrial powerhorses have been slaughtered in the past 20 years is another fact; Gardini for Chem, De Benedetti for Electronics and Computer are two easy picks (FIAT...). Cuccia's Mediobanca kept a stranglehold on business for 40 years while Milan's stock exchange is still the "Parco Buoi" that it was 20 years ago. Huge wallops of money were wasted in politically manoevered investments doping whole parts of our national industrial growth.
That Italy rapidly grew into consumerism without restraint is another fact and today we don't have a culturally strong middle class but a large social segment with lots of money to spend and no clue.
Yes I do lean on the leftish side but I'm NOT a red, I just happen to hate Berlusconi :-) but who wouldn't... he's a bad joke come true.

Damn Lag!

[Prien715]

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.

Re:Damn Lag!

[p2sam]

This always confuses me. The Earth is about 8 light seconds away from the Sun (don't they call it 1 AU or something?) I'd guess that distance between Earth and Mars is less than 10 AU. Therefore shouldn't the round trip time between Mars and Earth be less than 10 * 8 seconds * 2 == 160 seconds 3 minutes?

Re:Damn Lag!

[snake_dad]

Google calculator to the rescue!

Re:Damn Lag!

[Tomcat666]

GameSpy had a great article about this that I just found again:

Mars Needs Gamers - 3 part series with 2 pages each

Very good read! Funny as hell. :)

Excerpt:

Dev: It wasn't a moment too soon, man. See, for a while we had been using the Internet from the spaceship, but the farther we got from the Earth the harder and harder it got to find a good server. Once we got to Mars, it took a good seven minutes for a signal to reach the Earth and seven minutes to get back to us. That's a 14 minute lag. I tried to play Quake 3 Rocket Arena like that. Ever play a game with a 14 minute lag? You shoot a rocket, then the map changes before you find out if it hit. It's whack.

Re:Damn Lag!

[CXI]

The light distance to Mars is currently only 9 minutes and 40 seconds. That's usually about the same lag I get these days due to all the spam and worm traffic hear on Earth.

Mars24 utility

Re:Damn Lag!

[ThatTallGuy]

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.

Re:Damn Lag!

[nomel]

Remember, mars can be farther away than the sun.

Oh, the invasion from Mars has begun!

[Rheingold]

Not quite like Vonnegut predicted...

ITYM 8 light-MINUTES.

[Anonymous Coward]

1 AU / c = 8.31675359 minutes.

Re:ITYM 8 light-MINUTES.

[DiSKiLLeR]

And mars is about 1.5 to 1.6AU from the sun, or 0.6AU from the earth at opposition.

D.

Re:ITYM 8 light-MINUTES.

[innerlimit]

yupz, google is your friend, the article mentions that they'll be able to send/receive messages with a lag of aroound 9 to ten minutes (as opposed to 30 minutes using the mars orbiters to relay the message)

rtfm?

Lag Cures.

[Quirk]

I use copious amounts of coffee to off set lag, but if I'm faced with serious enduring lag I meditate ( I use a magic square with 64 squares and a number of relationships... I tried transendental meditation but it just didn't do it for me... the idea behind meditation is to engage the mind on all levels )Best wishes to the NASA crew... I'd be curious to know if there's a prefered way they deal with lag.

"Mars"?

[hey!]

That "Barsoom" you peasant!

I wanna Mars Watch!

[RobertB-DC]

Julie Townsend copes by wearing two watches: one on her left wrist set to Earth time, a second, specially modified, on her right running on Mars time.

"There are some things I only know in Mars time," said Townsend, a mission avionics engineer.

Time to write another note to the folks at ThinkGeek: please add the Mars Watch to your Gadgets :: Watches lineup! I want a Mars Watch!

And please, be sure to have it modelled by Ms. Townsend. For me, she's a great role model for my daughters. For the rest of Slashdot: she's a girl geek! Cool!

Re:I wanna Mars Watch!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

http://marsclock.sourceforge.net/

Open source, too.

--
Eeyore

Re:I wanna Mars Watch!

[gnu-generation-one]

"Time to write another note to the folks at ThinkGeek: please add the Mars Watch to your Gadgets :: Watches lineup! I want a Mars Watch!"

Thinking about how difficult it is even to get a watch with the right date format here (i.e. not "m/d/y"), I'd be interested to see if anyone makes a watch configurable enough to use mars time. Can you even buy a 2004-01-13 format clock/calendar in any stores?

That said, I've just remembered the microwave in our kitchen (at work) might qualify... it's certainly not using the same length days as we are.

Definitions, people...

[Transcendent]

have had to leave Earth time behind and attune their circadian clock to the Mars solar day or 'sol'

Now why in gods name did they name the martian day AND the Sun the same damn thing?

Restricting thought

[AllenChristopher]

You're absolutely right.... I'll be sure to ban the phrase "Slaving away on something" from my phrasebook.... also I'll scratch out the SL for "Slave" on my hard drive and replace it with NSMM for "Not so much the Master." I suppose I can keep the expression "slave to fashion"... Even the sweatshop kids are not so much slaves to their masters as a fashion model is to anorexia.

Further, I can't be "hungry," "tired," "sad," or "lonely"... think of the famine victims, the sufferes of sleep-deprivation torture, the survivors of the Iran earthquake, and the bubble-boys of the world. I can't be "tall," or "strong, or "smart," because of Shaq, Mister Universe and Stephen Hawking (also sometimes known as Mister Universe).

*********

It seems to me that the last thing we should be doing is erasing the other meanings of a word like slave... look how your post has illustrated the difference between metaphorical slavery and real slavery, thus bringing attention to slavery that might otherwise have been missed. In a sense, The Telegraph and you have conspired in community service. Bully for you. Without metaphorical slaves, it could never have happened.

That's why stardate was put in place

[Vexler]

...to correct for severe time differentials across "150 Federation planets, spread across 8000 light-years" (according to Jean-Luc).

Rover destroyed at the gates of Mars

[MarsDefenseMinister]

No rovers have landed on mars. The infidel dogs have failed to land on our planet. Our patriots have shot the infidel spacecraft from our skies. If you want to see the wreckage, I will take you there in ONE HOUR!

Shift workers are used to this

[skware]

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)

Schedule question

[Anonymous Coward]

What time are the spankings? I've yet to see them on cspan. Perhaps they occur after the press conference.

Retarded "story" for people who can't think

[Anonymous Coward]

This "story" is on the radio, too. All I can say is if you have more than the half mind that journo's have you can figure out there is nothing, NOTHING about time on Mars that has jack shit to do with what shift would be worked on Earth. If this "story" appealed to your imagination, you need to start thinking more.

Ehm... How voluntary is this? And how legal?

[ControlFreal]

As an engineer, I can very well understand that many of these people are living Mars Sols voluntarily; If I were one such a rover team, I would.

But exactly how voluntary is this? Or even legal? In the Netherlands, labour law (in Dutch, I'm afraid, articles 4.7:1 and 5.8) states that one cannot be forced to perform more than 28 night-shifts in 13 consequetive weeks under normal circumstances. Under special circumstances, I which work cannot reasonably be performed during normal working hours (which would be the case for the NASA workers here), the limit is 35 nights.

(If you work for a Dutch employer who wishes to force you to do this anyway, you get support from the unions, and the employer cannot even fire you without getting a "firing permission" from a judge, and he's not likely to get it for that reason).

Do US employers have any rights whatsoever? Note, I'm not trolling here: I've heard some stories from friends, who went to work in the US, that were particularly hairraising to say the very least...

Re:Ehm... How voluntary is this? And how legal?

[ControlFreal]

a damn... Last paragraph: s/employers/employees/

Re:Ehm... How voluntary is this? And how legal?

[herc_mk2]

Last I checked, there was no Local 427 of the Allied Brotherhood of Rocket Scientists and Affiliated Pointy-Heads at CalTech.

I suppose the folks doing this are doing it because they want to, of course... it's very likely that they view this as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 90 days of messed up sleep is nothing if you're doing what you love.

Re:Ehm... How voluntary is this? And how legal?

[bluGill]

Yes we have rights in the US. However they are different. We also have a work ethic unlike some counties (France in particular, we sent our cheif engineer to France to explain something, for one day, and they all left at 4:00. A one time deal and nobody was willing to work late).

They can make you work any hours they want. However you don't have to agree, there are other jobs. Typically people working the night shift are paid extra money in turn. And we consider it better for someone working nights to stay on the night shift instead of switching around and being tired all the time. It is easier to work your personal life around a consistant schedual and one that changes.

Most people however work the day shift, gnerally 8-5 (1 hour lunch), but the starting and ending times can vary by several hours so long as you work your 8 hours.

You don't need permission from a judge to fire someone, but it might as well be that way. fired means they had good reason to get rid of you. Most people who are fired stop showing up for work without a good excuse. Typically you are laid off, which gives you several weeks pay to find a new job.

Remember that in the US it is easier to get rid of someone, but that means it is easier to take a chance on someone. It works both ways, we don't hire people in countries where it is hard to fire someone unless we are sure they will work out. So it is somewhat easier to find a job in the US where you don't have a lot of expirence.

Overall though, things are different. There are good and bad points to both ways of doing things.

Me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just a slave to the funky beat.

As Recently Noted Elsewhere

[DynaSoar]

specifically: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91632& cid=7884415

They're not really adjusting their body clocks. The human body clock is aready set to 25 hours on average, same as the Martian day. They're just not resetting their body clock to adjust to Earth time.

I'm telling you, if you buy into this evolution stuff, you have to conclude that humans originated on Mars. Why else would we be trying so hard to get back?

The more important question is, why were we sent here anyway? What'd we do wrong? Is Earth the Australia of the solar system?

Better not...

[clarkcox3]

...let LA County hear about this, they may claim racial discrimination.