Now wait just a second, here....

...is that an earth second or a martian second?

Last night I downloaded that cool Palm app for Martian Time (not that I'll use it for anything more practical than the 'gee whiz' thrill.) Which reminded me of something I was wondering oh, sometime last week or so about Martian time.

A Martian day is longer than an Earth day by some 39.6 minutes, meaning that all earthling humanoids who are staying on Mars time are playing havoc with their body clocks.

Earth time has:

24 hours

x 60 minutes/hour

(or 1440 minutes in a day)

x 60 seconds/minute

(or 86400 seconds in a day)

But I want to know about the units of Martian time.

How many minutes are there in a Martian day? What units of time remain constant, and what units of time are changed?

If Mars time is counted by Earth-second, there are 1440+39.6 minutes, or 1479.6 minutes in a Martian day.

Divide that by 24 hours, and there are 61.65 minutes in a Martian hour. That's if a second is constant: if a second is a second is a second no matter where you are in the solar system.

But if Mars Time has 86400 seconds per day, that is, a day is divided by 24 hours divided by 60 minutes divided by 60 seconds, where the units of division are constant (86400 = 24 x 60 x 60), then each Mars second is 1.0275 times an Earth Second.

I pondered this aloud to Doc M, who said, "That's an interesting question. Because a second is a basic unit of measurement in physics."

Huh?

"The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. If you change how long a second is, then you change fundamental measurements."

Hm, I said. I guess that the universe really does revolve around the earth-- at least so far as measurements go. (But what do I know? Mine is a liberal arts education, I didn't cotton onto some of this physics stuff till much later in life.)

If you're reading this and you know the answer to the constant shared between Earth time and Mars time, spill it!

Comments

[Stu Savory]

There are various units of time, Susan.

Terracentrics originally defined the second as 1/86400 of a day. What day though? Mean solar day? So it was redefined in terms of a certain number of cycles of a very narrow spectral line (Google for details if you need them).

My request (in another of your comments), was to timestamp the Marsblog with the local martian time (i.e. 1/86400 parts of the mean martian day).

Local time being related to the position of the sun. So that when I blog, I state that the timestamps are Terran CET (Central European (local) time) zone.

Stu Savory

[Susan Kitchens]

Stu,

Thanks for comments re: 1/86400. I'll have to check it out..

RE: the timestamps, well... The software I use to post to this site is, well, terracentric. I'm limited by that, and frankly I do not wish to undergo the efforts necessary to somehow put Martian timestamps on here. I'd either do it manually, which'd mean that I'd post much less (which, considering the things I really *ought* to be doing, might be A Good Thing), or... or... well, I dunno. I'm caught up in Mars fever, but I'm afraid that finding a technical solution to display each and every post in Mars time would effectively kill blogging for me altogether.

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