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Saturday, September 1, 2012

Living on Mars Time

They still live on Earth, but David Oh and hundreds of scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have adopted such strange sleeping patterns that they might as well be living on Mars. You see, ever since the rover Curiosity landed on Mars, they've all switched to living on "Mars time."
Here's what the Oh family learned from living as if they were on the Red Planet:
A Mars day, called a sol, is 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than a 24-hour day on Earth. That small difference adds up fast, so that noon becomes midnight after 2 1/2 weeks. As scientists wind up sleeping during the day and working through the night, their lives pull away from those of their families.
Not the Oh clan. For the first month, all five have stuck together, an idea championed by David's wife, Bryn.
"This project for six years has been so much a part of his life," she said at the family's tidy two-story home in La CaƱada Flintridge. "This was a way that I thought that we could be a part of it."
Amina Khan of The Los Angeles Times has the story: here.

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