Time-Zone Problems

Anytime we plan to call someone in another country, whether for work or for personal reasons, we have to check what time is it out there. Call center operators work night shifts for the same reason. But at least the time difference between two places remains the same, except for the Day Light Saving adjustments made by some countries.

Imagine how much tougher it would be if the time difference between two places changed on a daily basis! That’s exactly the scenario that NASA engineers working with the Red Rover module on Mars have to face. Why? Because, as Nagin Cox, said in her TED talk:
“Our day is 24 hours. It takes Mars 24 hours and approximately 40 minutes to rotate once. So that means that the Martian day is 40 minutes longer than the Earth day.”
But why should that matter? Aha, because the plans/instructions for the next Mars day have to be relayed at (Mars) night, while the Rover “sleeps”, i.e., takes a break from her operations on Mars to recharge her batteries. Literally! So this is how Cox’s schedule moves:
“So one day you come in at 8:00, the next day 40 minutes later at 8:40, the next day 40 minutes later at 9:20, the next day at 10:00. So you keep moving 40 minutes every day, until soon you're coming to work in the middle of the night — the middle of the Earth night. Right? So you can imagine how confusing that is.”

It gets worse (or funnier). Communication even on earth when it comes to matters about the Rover can be very confusing:
“I remember somebody walked up to me and said, "I would like to do this activity on the vehicle tomorrow, on the rover." And I said, "Tomorrow, tomorrow, or Mars, tomorrow?"
All this has an inevitable psychological effect too:
“When you're moving a time-zone every day, you start to really feel separated from everyone else. You're literally in your own world.”

Multi-planetary time-zones are far more painful than the ones on earth, isn’t it?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarFebruary 11, 2019 at 1:29 PM

    We live in a normal world - it is men who make it crazy!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more