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Mars24 time clock5/27/2023 ![]() It's more complicated than that, because the whole day shifts, but that's pretty hard to describe. Anyone on Mars time will wake up 40 minutes later than they did the day before (we get up 8:00 day 1, 8:40 day 2, 9:20 day 3, etc.), and will consequently get an extra 40 minutes of sleep. Their clock is synchronized with the Martian clock, and moves 39 minutes every day.īRADEN: A day on Earth is 24 hours, but a day on Mars is about 24 hours and 40 minutes. To get those commands ready on time for the rover every day, the engineers work on Mars time. The engineers on Earth send the rover a new set of commands every Mars morning. All in all, pretty otherworldly.DAVID: Once the rover lands, it operates on a daily schedule where it works during the day and goes to sleep at night. So a Martian hour is slightly longer than an Earth hour, and a Martian minute slightly longer than an Earth minute. To do so, scientists simply divide the actual duration of a Martian day by 24 to calculate the length of a Martian hour, and divide that by 60 for the length of a Martian minute, and so on. One technical aspect to note is that although a Martian day is actually longer than 24 hours, the convention is still to express the time there in terms of a 24 hour period for convenience. (His watch is on view in the Air and Space Museum if you’d like to check the time for yourself.) ![]() Additionally, when working on the previous rovers Spirit and Opportunity, he and other members of the team wore special watches that actually ran on Martian time. Grant says that the software which shows his daily schedule of meetings and Mars-related events expresses each entry in both Earth and Mars times. Of course, Mars24 is fun for members of the public interested in following Curiosity, but the pros have their own ways of keeping track of Martian time. If you want to have a handy way to check the time on your smartphone, you’ll have to opt for a non-NASA app, such as Mars Clock or Mars Surface Times, both available in the App Store for iPhone, or Martian Time, available at Google Play for Android. Mars24 is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Mars24′s sunclock, showing which areas of Mars are light and dark. The app also includes a visual representation of Mars called a sunclock, which shows a map of which parts of the planet are currently light and dark. You can also alter the settings to see the time at given Martian landmarks, such as Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain on any planet in the Solar System. MSL, the Mars Science Laboratory) and even the immobile Viking 1 lander, which has been out of operation since 1982. MER, the Mars Exploration Rover ), Curiosity (a.k.a. ![]() NASA has produced a free Java application called Mars24 that provides the exact times for a number of places on the Red Planet, including the current location of Opportunity (a.k.a. ”It’s confusing to keep track of two different times, especially when you are used to living on one time and working on another that keeps shifting,” Grant says. Unlike, say, East Coast residents simply remembering to subtract three hours to know the time on the West Coast, scientists must keep track of a constantly varying difference between time zones. ![]() The problem is that Mars has a 24-hour and 39-minute day, so its time zones don’t match up with any on Earth. ![]() “So we are tied to the time of the downlink and when the uplink of the commands will occur the next morning.” “The rover downlink, in the afternoon on Mars, is what we use to plan the next day’s activities for the rover,” says Smithsonian scientist John Grant, who works on daily geologic data collection as well as long-term planning for the mission. Knowing exactly when afternoon arrives for a particular rover-either Opportunity, which landed in 2004 and is still in operation, or Curiosity, which arrived to great fanfare earlier this week-is crucial for its operators, since that is when data is uploaded from the craft and sent back to Earth. On top of all this, they must keep track of something most of us rarely consider: the time on Mars. Scientists and engineers must make thousands of decisions every day on what types of data to collect, what information to transmit back to Earth and where to guide the intrepid explorer next. Remotely controlling a rover on Mars can get a little bit complicated. ![]()
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