Hey Hubski!
Popping back in to post a cool interview I did last week, right before Percy landed on Mars, about my job driving the Curiosity Mars rover and working on Percy. Jim Green was a lot of fun to chat with. Enjoy!
Do you think there will ever be a need to have an ops team on Earth synched up to the Martian day to support astronauts on Mars? Has anyone done it before to support rover ops? For those unaware, the Martian day is 24 hrs. and 37 minutes long, so it's doable, I guess. edit: I apologize, it's covered smack dab in middle of the article. I'm in the habit of reading the intro/abstract and outro/conclusions: So OK, next question: Is it easy to do that?So in the very beginning of Mars missions, you go on, go on what's called Mars time where you wake up when the Sun would be rising with that rover, and then you go to bed at the end of the solar day. And so you're basically getting the data as it's coming down real time and then working with the rover as it's going throughout its day. As the rover gets a little bit older, then you no longer need to be on Mars time. And so we have different passes for each of the satellites, that gives us data. And so, if with MSL, we can have a normal, you know, eight to five schedule, and just count on the data coming in during the night when we're sleeping here on Earth, and be able to plan that way.