New Pioneers and Mars Time

The second book in the series is on it's way. Mars Exile: The New Pioneers continues the story of the people of the City of Opportunity on Mars. It is nine of Mars' years since David Brennan arrived on Mars, but he's nearly twice as old as he was when he arrived. So what's going on here?

Mars takes twice as long to go around the sun than Earth does. So one year on Mars is approximately (but not quite) two on Earth. That's about 687 days or 668 Mars sols. (A sol is what they call a day on Mars.) And that's not the whole story. The variation in the orbit of Mars that gives Mars its seasons is also more pronounced and it also moves a little each year. So it's not so straight forward. It would give astrologists something to think about.

This issue of years on Mars leads to a whole series of headaches. How do you work out what day to hold your birthday on if you were born on Earth? If you choose to hold it twice a Mars year on your Earthly birthday, then what day? Mars' sol is just over thirty minutes longer than a day on Earth. So each sol starts slightly later each day, until you get one so that actually starts on one day and does not finish until the second day. If you were making a telephone call, you would have to check on a pre-calculated calendar to make sure you were not waking your recipient up at one in the morning. It's bad enough doing that on Earth between different time zones. (Trust me, I've done it! Sorry Bill.)

Second Chances introduced the first child born on Mars. The New Pioneers gives us a brief glance of a whole new generation that have never known Earth. What we call teenager occurs now when a child is six or seven. What do the residents of Mars now call that terrible affliction of coming of age?

The City of Opportunity is lucky enough to be located close to Mars' Prime Meridian and uses Mars Standard Time (MST.) However, not everyone agrees with or uses MST. For individual missions, NASA usually uses Mean Local Time. Roughly meaning that when the sun is directly over head, it is noon. As colonies spread out from a starting point like the City of Opportunity, they would also use MST, otherwise it would start to get very hard to coordinate things. Actually, this is not an unfamiliar problem. Even on Earth it was not that long ago that Time Zones were coordinated and settled on. Even now there are some states that are in a time-zone of their own, fifteen minutes ahead of their closest neighbour. But that does not mean that other nations sending missions to Mars have to go by the same rules.

Buzz Aldrin on Mars

No, Buzz has never been to Mars, but he has been thinking about it. The second man to walk on the Moon had an idea of a space taxi service that would cycle continuously around the two planets, allowing supplies and people to be ferried back and forth.

It started off as a way to cheaply reach the Moon. He was asked to look at the same thing for Mars and he did. His method used gravity to power the trip using space craft that would be re-used. As the craft passed by, you would simply send a rocket up to meet it, dock with it, refuel, recharge and pass cargo or passengers and then disengage, letting it continue on it's cycle. Five months later, the craft passes Mars and the same process occurs - you intercept, unload, reload, etc, and it continues back to Earth.

This method, called the Aldrin Mars Cycler, was confirmed as achievable in the 1980's. In Buzz's eyes Astronauts that visit Mars ought to stay there for at least five years and with this kind of cheap  (relatively speaking) method of transporting supplies, perhaps stay there for the rest of their lives. He thinks that we could have a person on Mars by 2030.