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.