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."

well.....

[boogy nightmare]

Have these people never had to work to a deadline before ???

two words for them

JOLT COLA :)

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.

Re:well.....

[Hentai]

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'.

Re:well.....

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

Which bit of "exam week" implies fun? ;)

does it matter all that much?

[kurosawdust]

"Hey, what time is it?"

"Time to scoop up dust, analyze it and try to forget the fact that we pee through a tube."

"Oh."

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?

Re:does it matter all that much?

[davidstrauss]

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?

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.

Re:does it matter all that much?

[the_mad_poster]

I doubt there would be any significant implications. Barring detrimental health effects, anyway.

"Aging" is primarily affected by movement through time. Time is slowed down either by an increase in velocity in the first 3 dimensions (i.e. "move around faster") or an increase in gravity. The only effects that this trip would have on aging (again, barring detrimental health effects) would be due to the various changes in gravity and speed the travelers experience. However, the changes would be so miniscul

Re:does it matter all that much?

[afidel]

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!

Re:does it matter all that much?

[cyclist1200]

I dunno, those buildings are kinda old...

Mars24?

[Da Fokka]

A Java Application to display martian time? That sounds like a Java 101 excersise :)

Although the screenshots do look pretty neat.

Oh, those poor guys

[The Wing Lover]

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

Which is, of course, totally and completely different from what we do as computer people.

Re:Oh, those poor guys

[mwood]

ISTR experiments done years ago (spending months living underground, away from the influence of daylight) which showed that the human circadian rhythm free-runs at a period of about 26 hours, so maybe 24.66 hours is not too bad.

OTOH it could be a life-changing experience for some of them. Some people are more sensitive to the light/dark cycle than others. (See SAD, people who need melatonin supplements to get normal sleep in some parts of the year, etc.)

Re:Oh, those poor guys

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Oh, those poor guys

[Anonymous Coward]

But what is circadian?

Someone from Circadia, obviously.

I just wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they also be learning to live with the Terrible Secret of Space?

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, g

Project Planning Fantasy

[puppetluva]

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.

Re:Project Planning Fantasy

[Seahawk]

Or even better - this means they can stay in bed those 30 minutes we all want to when its time to get up...

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:25 hour cycle?

[Anonymous Coward]

These experiments were found to be invalid, because the people were given the ability to change the light level (ie there were dimmer switches on the bulbs). The bright artificial light was resetting their internal clocks to a longer day. A repeat of the experiment in constant dim lighting gave the result that people naturally live a 24-hour day.

Re:25 hour cycle?

[zCyl]

These experiments were found to be invalid, because the people were given the ability to change the light level (ie there were dimmer switches on the bulbs). The bright artificial light was resetting their internal clocks to a longer day.

The conclusion that a 25 hour day is inherent may be invalid, but the data is not. The natural environment we're born into these days is one of bright artificial light which we control. If under these conditions we have a tendency to tune to a 25 hour day, then that is

Re:25 hour cycle?

[TheLink]

If our bodies are such that you feel sleepy some time after it gets dark and if the dimmer thing is true then the 24+ hours could be because people don't tend to turn the lights down an hour in advance before they try to sleep. They turn the lights out and then try to sleep.

Now if the lights are on all the time, what would the cycle be?

Re:25 hour cycle?

[JavaLord]

actually we revert to a 24.39 hour life cycle which proves we are all really martians.

Re:25 hour cycle?

[sunhou]

Ever since I was about 10 years old and heard about those experiments of putting people in caves to study their natural time cycles, I've always been interested in participating in such an experiment.

The closest I came was when I was an undergrad, spending summers working at Los Alamos National Lab. I was doing some computer work, and my boss didn't really care what time of day I worked, as long as I did my stuff. So for about a month I stopped paying attention to clocks and schedules. I'd sleep when I

Re:25 hour cycle?

[satyap]

So we're all Martians anyway.

More likely, the Earth's rotation was a bit slower a few million years ago.

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.

Re:mixed solar and lunar cycles

[Carnildo]

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.

In the presence of a strong light/dark cycle (eg. living outdoors in the tropics), different age groups have different activity cycles. Teenagers and young adults tend to stay awake well after dark, waking up well after sunrise, mi

Blame the Aliens

[Vagary]

There are only two possible explanations for this phenomenon:

1. Humans evolved on another planet.
2. The Earth had a different orbit for a significant period of our recent evolution.

I'd say either one strongly implies that aliens have been seriously messing with us before the advent of civilization. There are certainly many mythological cosmologies that feature humans arriving from somewhere else -- are there any that could be taken to imply a change in the Earth's orbit?

25-26 Hour Sleep Cycle

[davidstrauss]

I don't see how this would be a problem. Several [go.com] credible [bbc.co.uk] reports [harvard.edu] exist that say our natural body clock cycle is 25-26 hours, making the adjustment to "Mars time" rather painless.

Re:25-26 Hour Sleep Cycle (Clarification)

[davidstrauss]

25-26 hours

Yes, I'm award the BBC report says 24 hours and 11 minutes. Still, it seems like as much of an adjustment living on strictly 24-hours as slightly more than 24 hours, 11 minutes.

Re:25-26 Hour Sleep Cycle

[CaptainAlbert]

> our natural body clock cycle is 25-26 hours,
> making the adjustment to "Mars time" rather
> painless.

Painless - assuming, that is, that NASA have the technology to produce a localized variation in the hours of daylight...

And have you ever tried to order out for pizza at 9am (Earth time)? Not even Stephen Hawking has a fix for that one. :)

Re:25-26 Hour Sleep Cycle

[davidstrauss]

And have you ever tried to order out for pizza at 9am (Earth time)? Not even Stephen Hawking has a fix for that one. :)

There's always DiGiorno. Also, don't forget that other scientists, namely astronomers, have displaced sleep schedules, even though they keep a 24-hour day. Pizza is hard to order at 05:00 also.

Re:25-26 Hour Sleep Cycle

[sklib]

The hours of daylight only matter if you have a window in your office, and depend on that for lighting. Almost every enginering lab I've been in was buried in the middle of a huge building, with maybe a row of covered windows on one side. To make it seem like "work-time", all they have to do is keep the lights on.

Also, if they expect engineers to work at weird hours of the night, surely they will also keep a couple of people around in the cafeteria to cook pizza. And when all else fails, there's always hot pockets. Besides, all the NASA people have probably gone through this sort of schedule-shifting in college, so I'm sure they know all the tricks.

So...

[Trashman]

...When are going to switch to the "Stardate" notation of time?

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.

People with no circadian rhythms

[wackybrit]

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, o

Sounds like a crazy idea

[zhenlin]

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.

Re:Sounds like a crazy idea

[richie2000]

completely ignoring local time.

Well, say you set up a lunch meeting with the Martians at 12 o'clock sharp and you show up 15 minutes late, what does that say about us as a species? Is that really the message you want to send them?

Re:Sounds like a crazy idea

[jonknee]

I'm pretty sure the operational definition of a second is the amount of time it takes your planet to go 86,400 of it's rotation. Call them Earth seconds or Martian seconds, but they are still just seconds.

Re:Sounds like a crazy idea

[MCZapf]

That definition is about four decades out-of-date. The official SI definition is currently this:

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

The reason for this definition is that the old one was too imprecise. See Base unit definitions: Second [nist.gov].

They should have used metric divisions of "sols"

[FreeUser]

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

Re:They should have used metric divisions of "sols

[zCyl]

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.

There's plenty of reason. Scientists prefer their choice of units to most naturally reflect the environment in which they're working. Kelvin is a more natural temperature scale for fundamental work, but Celsius, with

Good idea off-planet, bad idea at home

[freeweed]

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

Re:Good idea off-planet, bad idea at home

[dillon_rinker]

Actually, we go through 13 lunar cycles in a year. The calendar year is more easily measured on the basis of solar events - the equinox and the solstice. The year is thus naturally divided into four seasons. Each of these seasons then contains a little more than three lunar cycles. So the year isn't based on 12 lunar cycles but four seasons of about three cycles each.

Minutes and seconds go back to the Babylonians and their base-60 (sexagesimal) numbering system. We don't really know why they used a base 60

Radians!

[Vagary]

Set your base to accomodate pi?

They're called radians. They're the metric equivalent of degrees. They make geometry easy. Therefore our geometric overlords discourage their use.

They could be used for time, the base unit ("one-pi radian") would be half a revolution, or two Quarters. Of course all systems of time based on natural phenomena will have a problem with either years or days because they just don't add up. Therefore we need to change the Earth's orbit.

Re:Radians!

[Jon Chatow]

[...] radians [...] [a]re the metric equivalent of degrees

Um, I'm pretty sure that that's grads, actually :-)

BZZZT! Try Again

[Vagary]

You're wrong. [xent.com]

Just because grads happen to give some significance to powers of ten doesn't automatically make them metric. They're far too arbitrary to enter the league of extraordinary units that is the SI.

Seconds, Not Sols

[Vagary]

Why use "sols" which are, of course, highly variable, when we already have the metric unit "second"? Yes, seconds are rather arbitrary, but at least they're rigorously defined (by the decay of Cesium-133).

<aside>
I'd like to take this opportunity to propose changing the specification of a "second": one of the design goals (possibly back-specified) of the metric system is the ease of calculating the base units at home. So, in keeping with the SI obsession with water, I propose that the base unit of

Now theres a fuckup waiting to happen?

[baadfood]

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.

We need metric time!

[Cyno01]

10 hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, 100 seconds a minute. 1 day = 100000. 1 metric second = .864 "standard" (the prayer schedual of 13th century monks or something...) seconds. Should make for easy conversions between planets and such.

Re:Now theres a fuckup waiting to happen?

[pizzaman100]

A day thats still 24 hours long, but 39 minutes longer than an earth day? Is that Earth or Mars minutes now?

Maybe we can redirect an appropriately sized asteroid to hit Mars and increase the planet's rotation speed by 39 minutes.

Or heck, redirect one towards earth to slow us down. :)

On the subject of Mars...

[Aardpig]

...lets not forget that the European Space Agency's [esa.int] Mars Express [esa.int] mission has almost reached the red planet, and that the British-built Beagle 2 [esa.int] probe onboard will be touching down on Christmas Day, to begin its search for life. I for one am very excited!

Re:On the subject of Mars...

[purrpurrpussy]

DAMN RIGHT!!!! I reckon this is going to be one of the most exciting chrimbos EVER! I think I need a large bottle of Rum, a big TV and a decent net connection then I'm set for chrimbo day!

Let's hope it doesn't just smash into Mars! GOOD LUCK COLIN PILLINGER AND EVERYONE ELSE INVOLVED IN BEAGLE!!!!

Yeah - I sound like a rabid cheerleader but I'm excited too!!

Re:On the subject of Mars...

[calibanDNS]

The Mars24 application lets you mark several 'Martian landmarks' on the map that it provides. This includes the Beagle 2's landing sight. I don't see Mars Express in the list, but the Jar includes an XML document of the landmarks, so if they've done their job you simply need to add entries to the XML document.

On a similar note, looking at the contents of the Mars24 app reveals classes named EarthTime, MarsTime, and TitanTime. So, I'm wondering why they didn't include the functionality to let us monito

Re:On the subject of Mars...

[snake_dad]

Don't forget that on Dec. 19th we have the very important separation of Beagle2 and Mars Express [esa.int]. Make or break time for the mission!

At 9:31 CET, ESA's ground control team at Darmstadt (Germany) will send the command for the Beagle 2 lander to separate from Mars Express. A pyrotechnic device will be fired to slowly release a loaded spring, which will gently push Beagle 2 away from the mother spacecraft.

Data on the spacecraft's position and speed will be used by mission engineers to assess whether the lan

Obviously a good idea

[BabyDave]

'cause A Mars day helps you work, rest and play

Well now...

[freidog]

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?

Re:Well now...

[banzai51]

That depends on the strength of the gravity well and your frame of reference.

Re:Well now...

[Fenris2001]

Ahem.

On October 20, 1980, the meter was redefined. The definition states that the meter is the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The speed of light is c = 299,792,458 m/s.

So if Martian seconds are longer, then you would change the time interval to match, and the meter would stay the same length.

One thing nobody seems to get: They didn't just sit down and decide to define a Martian second arbitrarily. The guys at JPL are smart. If it was

Re:Well now...

[b-baggins]

Doesn't work that way. There's a reason the second is defined as the basic SI unit of time. You start playing around with your basic units of measure, then all your derived units are screwed.

Now, if the folks at JPL make the Martian Second a derived unit, called a MarSec or something equally inane, but based upon the SI time unit of the second, then perhaps this will work.

That is, until someone forgets to convert units and we wind up with another hundred million down the toilet.

Re:Well now...

[ScottSpeaks!]

I can understand the motivation to redefine the length of a "second", as a convenience for the researchers on this mission who expect to find the sun directly overhead their instruments at noon. But it's just a fundamentally bad idea as a precedent for interplanetary time-keeping.

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 th

Re:Well now...

[pe1rxq]

Since the second lasts longer there it will be faster (more time to spend moving)
Better yet: Since mars is smaller than earth some idiot is going to sugest redifining the meter on mars to be smaller and thus making your cars speed even faster.
The same idiot is probably also going to redefine G to be the same as the gravity on the surface of mars and thus your car will not only have a ridicilous top speed it will also be able to accelerate really fast.....

Jeroen

Re:Well now...

[pe1rxq]

In that case I would install a Neptune speedo in my car....
With a Martion speedo the police would get you off the road for driving to slow.....

Jeroen

24/7

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that dratted "24/7" slogan is definitely doomed on Mars.

Not a big deal

[Pedrito]

Lots of people work alternating shifts that leave them with much worse schedules than this, and they get by fine. Or they go insane. No, I'm kidding. Seriously, a 40 minutes/day difference is nothing to adjust to. The hard part is just getting used to being awake and working at night if you haven't done it.

I personally work much better when I can actually see sunlight. Even cloudy days slow me down a bit (which is part of the reason I live 4 blocks from a caribbean beach in Mexico). But I've worked schedul

What unit is that measured in?

[halo8]

Mars Time????

Is that Metric [nasa.gov] or is that Imperial? [lockheedmartin.com]

I mean.. like.. shouldnt they wait to see if it actually lands this time?

Mars day so close to Earth day

[BallPeenHammer]

I find it remarkable that the length of a Mars day is nearly the same as an Earth day. The two planets have had very different kinds of histories. Plus, the Moon's gravitational effect is gradually slowing down the Earth's rotation, effectively lengthening the day.

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?

Re:Mars day so close to Earth day

[FroBugg]

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) s

Re:Mars day so close to Earth day

[HeghmoH]

That's not coincidence, that's a result of tide locking. Tides create friction in a rotating body which slows it down and it eventually stops. This is why the Earth's rotation is slowing down, why the Moon's orbit is getting bigger (angular momentum transfers from the Earth to the Moon) and why the Moon always shows the same face to the Earth. See Mercury for another example, it's not locked but it rotates exactly 1.5 times for every orbit. There are other examples as well, I'm sure.

Re:Mars day so close to Earth day

[ShavenYak]

The other one is the lunar orbit coinciding perfectly with the lunar rotation, so that the same side of the moon always faces Earth.

Not as spectacular, but certainly a coincidence with consequences.

That's not really so much of a coincidence. It's a result of the Earth's gravity. Given enough time, any satellite will end up like that (or possibly in some other kind of resonance, like Mercury's 2/3 day and year or whatever it is).

What's more, the effect works in reverse too. The Earth's gravity is speedi

Not really a coincidence

[Grotus]

Yup, this is one of my two faves. The other one is the lunar orbit coinciding perfectly with the lunar rotation, so that the same side of the moon always faces Earth.

That second favorite of yours is no coincidence. It's just the inevitable result of two bodies orbiting each other.

You should read up on tidal locking, here, I'll get you started. [google.com]

Quick link to 1st google result [yarchive.net]

Re:Mars day so close to Earth day

[CrystalFalcon]

Or, is this just how the Designers planned this particular planetary system?

All the fjords on Mars have evaporated, so any possible designer signatures are, unfortunately, lost in time.

Time Slip

[Dr. Hok]

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!

Re:Time Slip

[gobbo]

About the same time they adopt Robinson's inane socialist utopia. What is it with you non-scientists defining the world by science fiction authors? It's perplexing.

SF is a thought experiment in the social realm, technology included, and you shouldn't expect much less. Robinson is using utopian ideas influenced in large part by Fredric Jameson [uci.edu] [among others], which means he's fairly well-informed on large-scale social trends. (Not to mention making probably the best literary adaptation of geomorphology to

Re:Time Slip

[gobbo]

You need to go back and read the trilogy [you don't have to read it carefully to get this]. There is much ado about the complicated economic relationships driving the development of terraforming [not just some boneheaded sense of capitalism vs. socialism], and frequent reference to the unprecedented expense of these mega-mega-projects. There is no "optimistic assumption" that terraforming is without effort, quite the contrary. It's described as the most expensive and difficult human endeavour ever undertake

How will cron like this???

[MrPink2U]

30 24 * * * /usr/bin/phone.home >/dev/null 2>&1

A simple solution

[AndroidCat]

Just sleep in an extra 39 minutes every morning. It works for me!

Metric time?

[brucmack]

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.

Re:Metric time?

[b-baggins]

The selection of 60 for seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour was not arbitrary. The number 60 is evenly divisible by more numbers than any other number between one and one hundred. It's the extreme opposite of a prime number, if you will.

The same reasoning went behind selecting 360 for the number of degrees in a circle.

Lucky Marsians...

[BTWR]

Lucky Marsians... that mean they get an extra 39 minutes per television season of "24!"

Mercury...

[virve]

I hope that nobody will try to implement this on a mission to Mercury. The term 'a 90-day jetlag' might be a tad more appropriate in the Mercurian case than in the Martian case...

--
virve

Constant jet lag would be good how?

[ianscot]

Okay, this is kind of a neat idea, but doesn't it seem like jerking the mission people's sleep cycles around all the time might be kind of a bad thing?

Do you perform your best when you're exhausted, or even when you're just out of your routine? I know I flub routine stuff then -- or I spend energy remembering where I put my keys, so that the more challenging, more abstract stuff on my list gets less attention.

Maybe NASA needs to ask factories that have changing shift structures how they get things done,

Re:Constant jet lag would be good how?

[Jesrad]

I have a circadian cycle of 25 hours, which means I go to sleep one hour later every day and wake up one hour later. I have to "reset" every three or four days or I run into trouble with the rest of the world. It is tiring and I lose concentration all the time.

On inactive periods (typically holidays) I inevitably end up sleeping during the morning and cooking my dinner around 2-3 AM. When I'm completely "shifted half-way" it's quite annoying. Colleagues go to lunch when I go to bed. Where I live, there are

And back at NASA, Earth time

[Ilan Volow]

Perplexed scientists try to explain why every 33 days the rover Spirit goes on the fritz and craves chocolate.

seashore living has daily tidal time delay

[peter303]

The moon rises about 50 minutes later each day, and the tides occur later too. A few jobs that depend on the tides- fishing, seashore activities, walking across Venice without getting wet, etc.- will notice this change. Dont have to changew your sleep patterns like on Mars.

Metric Time

[LPetrazickis]

As some of the posters above have noted, the human body is not a happy camper when it comes to a 24-hour day.

In my humble opinion, that means we have a perfectly valid excuse to switching to metric time and measuring everything in seconds.;)

That is because the very intuitive duration of 100 kiloseconds is equal to slightly over 27 hours. That would give us an extra three hours of sleep or whatever else we would want in a day.:)

Metric time now!:P

Tried that

[Anonymous Coward]

A.k.a "drop dead cycle"

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 enjoy

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.

Kim Stanley Robinson had a cool idea

[WhiteDragon]

Kim Stanley Robinson, in his books Red Mars [isbn.nu], Green Mars [isbn.nu], and Blue Mars [isbn.nu], had a really interesting system. Instead of keeping a 24 hour day and gradually getting out of sync w/ daylight, they add a 39 minute long "second" at midnight.

human internal clock-day is 25 hours

[shaunyb]

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.

Submariners have been doing it

[MikeMo]

for years and years. The folks that man our nuclear subs live on an 18-hour cycle. For example, they get up a 7AM, stand watch from 8AM until 2PM, eat, shower (sometimes!), conduct maintenance, get some sleep, and then get up at 1AM. Then they stand watch from 2AM until 8AM, and so on. They do this for 2-3 months at a time.

Let me tell you, you get really, really tired at the end of this!

RTFA?

[CXI]

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.

You know what the Qeng Ho say ....

[kalidasa]

You've been there too long when you start using the local calendar.

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.

Re:Working time directive

[davidstrauss]

Blimey, they can always record the Simpsons if they don't want to miss it.

I can see it now: special edition TiVo for people on "Mars time."

It doesn't run directly off the solar cells

[kippy]

actually, the rover has solar panels that do nothing but charge the onboard batteries. Since the power coming in from panels could go up or down, it makes much more sense to have the thing run off of batteries for a constant charge and then recharge the batteries with the solar cells.

Re:I don't understand why..

[Jesrad]

I think the operations are tests to collect hard data about concentration and ability to perform. Instead of theorizing about how the longer day could affect the astronauts and possibly jeopardize basic Mars mission's operations, nothing beats a good old practical test.

Besides, some of us were meant to live on Mars ;)