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Space Science

NASA's Spirit Rover Crew Are 'Slaves To Mars' 46

Posted by timothy 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.'"
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NASA's Spirit Rover Crew Are 'Slaves To Mars' More

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

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  • Mars Time (Score:4, Funny)

    by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @12:29AM (#7888457) Journal
    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.
    • 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.

  • Damn Lag! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@gmail. c o m> on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @01:05AM (#7888667) Journal
    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! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by p2sam ( 139950 )
      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?
    • GameSpy had a great article about this that I just found again:

      Mars Needs Gamers [gamespy.com] - 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 p

    • 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 [nasa.gov]

  • Not quite like Vonnegut predicted...

  • 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"? (Score:3, Funny)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @08:43AM (#7890309) Homepage Journal
    That "Barsoom" you peasant!

  • I wanna Mars Watch! (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @09:47AM (#7890840) Homepage Journal
    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 [thinkgeek.com] lineup! I want a Mars Watch!

    And please, be sure to have it modelled by Ms. Townsend [chron.com]. 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! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

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

      Open source, too.

      --
      Eeyore

    • "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

  • Definitions, people... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Transcendent ( 204992 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @10:16AM (#7891153)
    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?
  • ...to correct for severe time differentials across "150 Federation planets, spread across 8000 light-years" (according to Jean-Luc).

  • Shift workers are used to this (Score:3, Informative)

    by skware ( 78429 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @10:57AM (#7891621) Homepage
    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)

  • 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 [ggznederland.nl] (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

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

    • 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.

    • 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

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

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