This photo is the first image of Mars taken by NASA’s InSight Mars lander after its successful landing on the plains of Elysium Planitia on Nov. 26, 2018. The dust seen in the image is on a dust cover protecting the camera.
Time zones are constantly complicated, but interplanetary time differences are even harder to preserve, and now that NASA’s Mars InSight lander has successfully landed on the Red Planet, that’s exactly what the mission group of workers and contributors have to do.
A Martian day isn’t too different in length from a terrestrial day—iit’s only about 37 minutes longer. But over time, all these minutes add up to offset a Martian day, referred to as a sol, from Earthly schedules.
And it turns out that’s a pain for the people who control Martian robots like the InSight lander—ppeople like payload structure engineer Farah Alibay. The InSight group is small enough that the participants don’t divide into shifts like the humans behind the Curiosity rover do; instead, they work as one group, Alibay advised Space.com in a video interview. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: Full Coverage]
The people on the team additionally want to work at some stage in the Martian night while the spacecraft isn’t working. So they signed on the day before today at three p.m. local time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California (6 p.m. EST, 2300 GMT) for a shift lasting 12 hours, as Alibay stated earlier than In Sight landed. But if they usually followed Martian time, their agenda would drift 37 minutes from day to day, which is hard for humans to manage. “Doing that shift each day is just too hard for human bodies,” Alibay said.
So participants in the group have worked out a compromise. “When the planets align and we’re capable of working in the course of our daytime and Martian nighttime, then we work each day, and then when they don’t, we work each other day. And there are masses of scientific evaluation to be finished on the floor in between these days anyway, so it sort of works out.”
The mission’s calendar will run in sols, with the landing on Nov. 26 marking sol zero (InSight’s science mission is scheduled to last 709 sols total, or almost two terrestrial years). So, for Alibay and her colleagues, who have to navigate Earthly sunrises, errands, and household schedules while they work with the Insight lander, it’s a relief no longer to be stuck on Mars time for all 709 of those sols.
