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The Phoenix Mission's "Phoenix Time" is a Flash application that displays the local Mars Time at the Phoenix landing site. It does this using a time offset from the "standard Mars time." In analogy to Earth's coordinated universal time (UTC), this is the local mean solar time at Mars' prime meridian, which is defined by the location of the crater Airy-0. The algorithm used to calculate the standard Mars time is based on the Mars24 application distributed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Phoenix Time also displays the number of Mars solar days, or "sols", that Phoenix has been operating on Mars. A Mars solar day has a mean period of 24 hours 39 minutes 35.244 seconds (in Earth time). This is approximately 3% longer than a solar day on Earth. Unlike Pathfinder and the MER rovers, which designate "Sol 1" as the solar day on which touchdown occurred. Phoenix will start with "Sol 0" as its touchdown solar day. Phoenix Time displays the time on Mars based on the Phoenix web server clock. This method was chosen because the Phoenix Web Development Team can verify the accuracy of this clock. This ensures that no matter which computer the application is viewed on, the time will always remain the same. Our approach is slightly different then Mars24, which uses your local computer's clock to determine the time on Mars. Using this approach, the time on Mars cannot accurately be determined unless your computer's time, time zone and date are set correctly.  |
THE MISSIONThe University of Arizona is honored to be the first public university to lead a mission to Mars. The Phoenix Mars Mission, scheduled to land May 25, 2008, is the first in NASA's "Scout Program." Scouts are designed to be highly innovative and relatively low-cost complements to major missions being planned as part of the agency's Mars Exploration Program. Learn More |
The Phoenix Mission is led by Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith of The University of Arizona, supported by a science team of CO-Is, with project management at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and development partnership with Lockheed Martin Space Systems. International contributions are provided by the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus Denmark; the Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. Additional information on Phoenix is online at here and here. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Additional information on NASA's Mars program is online at here.
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In remembrance of Diane Michelangeli
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