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.'"

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

[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.

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-geologis

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

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?

[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'

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 ha

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 an

Re:Challenge, huh?

[isorox]

Libertarian != liberals

Liberals are leftist whackjobs

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

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?

ITYM 8 light-MINUTES.

[Anonymous Coward]

1 AU / c [google.com] = 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?

Re:Damn Lag!

[snake_dad]

Google calculator [google.com] to the rescue!

Re:Damn Lag!

[ThatTallGuy]

That's 8 minutes, not eight seconds. Refer here [arizona.edu].

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 [encyclopedia.com].) 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-

Re:Damn Lag!

[nomel]

Remember, mars can be farther away than the sun.

Re:Damn Lag!

[Tomcat666]

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

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 [nasa.gov]

Oh, the invasion from Mars has begun!

[Rheingold]

Not quite like Vonnegut predicted...

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 [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!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

http://marsclock.sourceforge.net/ [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

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?

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).

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)

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 [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

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

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

Better not...

[clarkcox3]

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