Mars-Time Apps

January 23, 2004 12:05 PM

You may be familiar with the story, reported here, about the southern California watch maker who supplied wrist watches for Mars scientists to get to work on time. You may not have seen these time applications that make the time story equally as compelling for the rest of us. What is interesting from a graphics standpoint is the different qualities expressed with these versions, as a table of exact times for specific locations (this site has a lot of great detail about the mission), or as an approximate time with shadows projected on the Mars map (for Mac OS X). Any other Mars time graphics that you know about?
posted by xtian (5 comments total)

A better link for the desktop application also has the Windows version with a screen shot. I enjoy commenting on other peoples links here at metafilter -ehehe-, I hope u enjoy my first post.
posted by xtian at 12:44 PM on January 23, 2004

Here's the unbroken second link.

And Here's the first.
posted by psychotic_venom at 12:52 PM on January 23, 2004

You can buy a Mars Alarm Clock from Acroname that will allow you to keep up with the Mission Time on Mars...
posted by qDot at 1:06 PM on January 23, 2004

hey psychoic, thanks for the correx.
I did notice a problem when I first hand coded the links into the message. This returned an error, but I corrected the text--or so it seemed. My bad. I should have restarted my browser to clear the cache.
posted by xtian at 2:16 PM on January 23, 2004

Enough about the links- the Mars 24 app is worth looking at. You can model the planetary orbits, such as the August 03 point where Mars was the closest to Earth in 57k. And there is a clock display that indicates a measurement of the current distance between E+M.

"Below the user's local time and date is the light distance between Earth and Mars, i.e., the amount of time a photon would take to traverse the distance between the two planets. Depending on the current relative orbital positions of the two planets, this value ranges between 3 and 22 minutes."
posted by xtian at 6:46 PM on January 24, 2004