Cindy Oda and her husband, both NASA engineers, sleep with eyeshades in the middle of the day.
Their kids have missed swim practice. Take-out food boxes are piling up in the garbage. After work, they aren't sure whether to say "good morning" or "good night."
"The dishes don't get done," Oda said. "There are toys everywhere."
The cause of this havoc is Mars.
Since the landing of the Spirit rover on Jan. 3, more than 200 scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena have shifted their work schedules to match Mars' alien rhythm.
The Martian day is 39.5 minutes longer than an Earth day, meaning our night and day rarely coincide with Mars'.
To stay in sync with the rover's most productive daylight hours, mission controllers must shift their work schedule as well.
Thus, team members who started work at 8 a.m. at the beginning of Spirit's 90-day mission started at 12:37 p.m. a week later and would start at 3:48 a.m. after a month.
It's enough to throw off the delicate circadian rhythm of human beings and make them a little spacey.
"It's not easy," said Nagin Cox, deputy team chief of the rover engineering team. "We are earthlings, after all."
Keeping accurate Martian time is important because controllers can schedule work for the solar-powered rovers only during daylight hours on Mars.
The work of earthbound scientists and engineers is so specialized -- and the timetable so strict -- that they can't work regular shifts and hand off unfinished work to others.
NASA has gone to some lengths to work with the odd hours.
Clocks keeping time on both planets are projected onto white boards throughout the lab. Blinds keep out sunlight to minimize day-night confusion. Food carts come through work areas at night on a schedule that moves 40 minutes later every day. And two local jewelers were asked to produce specially calibrated watches that accurately add those minutes to every day.
But it's a hopeless exercise.
Humans, such as they are, make lousy Martians.
After millions of years of evolution, humans are adapted to 24-hour days. We can't even handle jet lag very well.
"I just keep asking: 'What time is it? What time is it?' " Oda said.
It's actually lucky that Spirit landed on Mars and not, say, Saturn's moon, Titan, where a day lasts 382.69 hours.
"Time would really drag there," said Michael Allison, a space scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He is working on a NASA mission to Titan and will have to deal with Titan time when a probe is scheduled to land there in January 2005.
Of the nine planets in our solar system, Mars has the most similar "day" to Earth. Each Martian day is called a "sol," which, in Earth style, is divided into 24 "hours." But because Mars spins around its axis at a slightly slower speed than Earth, its day is a bit longer -- 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds to be exact.
Mars also has its own time zones. Spirit, which landed at a spot named Gusev Crater, is in what NASA calls "Local Solar Time A."
When the second rover, Opportunity, lands on the opposite side of Mars at a plateau known as Meridiani Planum on Jan. 24, engineers and scientists will get another time zone that is 12 hours ahead, "Local Solar Time B."
Adding to the time confusion are the myriad other time frames used on the mission.
There is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which many scientists and engineers prefer to specific U.S. time zones.
The rover's activities are recorded in "Space Craft Event Time" (SCET), which is UTC, counted by the craft's own clock. Because a transmission from Earth takes about 10 minutes to reach Mars and vice versa, mission crews also talk about "Earth Transmit Time" (ETT) and "Earth Receive Time" (ERT).
It all adds up to confusion for workers living on Pacific Standard Time (PST). "You have to qualify everything," Oda said.
Although scientists have been interested in seasonal weather changes on Mars since the early 1900s, hourly clock time on the Red Planet has been an issue only since the first U.S. spacecraft, Viking 1 and 2, landed there in 1976, Allison said.
The Pathfinder mission, which ferried the little rover Sojourner to Mars in 1997, was one of the first times scientists tried to live on Mars time. But that was only for a month.
Spirit and Opportunity will keep them out of sync for three months or more.
Oda, a 39-year-old Monterey Park resident, worked on the Pathfinder mission and didn't mind the odd schedule.
She was pregnant then with her first child and Martian hours harmonized with her wacky body clock. "I could take a nap whenever I wanted," she said.
Now she has kids, and it's more complicated.
Oda works about 12 hours at JPL, helping to code and transmit computer instructions for the rover. When she gets home, her husband, Jeffrey Biesiadecki, heads to the lab to program flight software and schedule Spirit's daily activities.
