Team Curiosity Switch to Earth Time

The team that has been working on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity for the past three months has announced that they will be switching back to working on Earth time.

A day in Mars known as Sol by NASA is 40 minutes longer than Earth's day. The team accumulated a lot of hours in the ensuing weeks resulting in them working in shifts of long durations.

From this week, the team, working with Curiosity's instruments and operations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif, will stay within bounds of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., PST. Compressing the daily planning process for rover activities makes the switch possible.

Prior to this the team had been working in shifts aligned with Martian time for the first 90 Mars days, or Sols, of the mission.

"People are glad to be going off Mars time," said Richard Cook, project manager for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project, which operates Curiosity. "The team has been successful in getting the duration of the daily planning process from more than 16 hours, during the initial weeks after landing, down to 12 hours. We've been getting better at operations." 

The team comprises of about 200 JPL engineers and 400 scientists. About 200 non-JPL scientists, borrowed from other institutions and who have been working at JPL since Curiosity's landing on Aug. 5, 2012, will continue participating regularly from their home institutions throughout North America and Europe. The team will stay connected through teleconferences and Web connections.

"The phase that we're completing, working together at one location, has been incredibly valuable for team-building and getting to know each other under the pressure of daily timelines," said Mars Science Laboratory Deputy Project Scientist Joy Crisp, of JPL. "We have reached the point where we can continue working together well without needing to have people living away from their homes."

This week the team is focused on getting a first sample of solid Martian material into the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.

Also on Sol 89 came confirmation that SAM had completed an overnight analysis run on a blank sample cup in preparation for receiving a soil sample.