Increasing Time Helps Prepare for Martian Habitation-Part II
“It totally messes you up to shift every day,” says Matt Golombek, who was the project scientist for Pathfinder, and is the Science Operations Working Group chair and long-term planning lead for the MER missions. “You’re not going to the bank. You’re not talking to your friends. You see deer more than you see people at JPL. You’re on another planet.”
Working the night shift on Mars is a totally different shift every night, according to the crewmembers that work it. Martian time is known to be different as Earth time, but very few people actually look at the communication issues that develop because of it. We know that the Spirit and Opportunity have a responsibility as the twin rovers to send scientific data back to Earth. But very few know that in order for Spirit to communicate sufficiently to Earth to receive commands or to transmit data, there are two conditions that need to be met that are controlled by the rotation of Mars:
· It has to be daytime on Mars, in order for the Spirit’s transmitter to be warmed up and powered by the sun’s energy
· Earth has to be present in the Martian sky above Gusev Crater
The communication between the rover and Earth takes place about 39.5 minutes later on Earth when it is received, than it did on Mars when the communication left. Once this data is received by the Earth scientists, which tells them what the rover did or did not do in response to what they had been told earlier to do, they have only about two hours to absorb the information, and then decide what further orders are to be given for the next day—while “delivering a sequence of desired activities to the engineers,” according to NASA. The engineers’ responsibility was then to translate these activities into a specific command sequence for the next uplink opportunity. And remember, the positions of the planets need to be just “so-so” and there is only two hours or so to complete all of this.
Mars time is always followed, even here on Earth in order to accommodate the “requirements of interplanetary communication,” of which the Spirit’s science and engineering teams live within Mars’ cycle of light and dark. The labor force here on Earth will work alternately days and nights, depending. Meantime, the team of Spirit will work over the course of five weeks, or 36.5 days, a full complete cycle around the cycle, shifting only slightly each day.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
