Ok @NASAPersevere fans, you might be asking yourself what is Mars time and why do you have to work a night shift to drive a rover on Mars? A thread 1/ https://twitter.com/ironywithab/status/1361630317048721413

Rover 101: Mars is far enough away (7-20 minutes for radio signals) that we can’t drive the rover directly - instead we typically upload a full day’s plan of work at a time, and the rover semi-autonomously executes all the driving and science on its own 2/

Driving and most science data collection happens during daylight hours on Mars (need sunlight for science and navigation cameras!), so we have a hard upload deadline to get a plan to the rover before the day starts. 3/

It takes 12+ hours right now to put together and validate a full day’s plan of work, which then gets uploaded to the rover via the @dsn_status. 4/

But the data from the rover telling us where it ended up and what tasks it was able to complete the day before, as well as all of the awesome images and science data, get relayed back through @NASA and @esa satellites in Mars orbit 5/

We need that downlink data to start planning, so our operations shifts start as soon as we get the data down, so that we can get the plan uploaded to the rover by the start of the next Mars day. 6/

But the downlink it doesn’t always come at a convenient time on Earth. The orbiters are mostly in orbits where they pass over the rover at the same time everyday on Mars, but the Mars day is ~40 min longer than ours 7/

This means that if the data comes down at 9pm tonight, our shift starts around then, but the next night our shift will start a little later. Over the course of a few weeks the shift times walk all the way around the clock 8/

This is Mars time, it is both incredibly exciting and exhausting. 9/

As we get more efficient the time to create a plan will drop and eventually we’ll be able to squeeze this timeline into a semi-normal working day, like on @MarsCuriosity. 10/

If we didn’t do this we would lose many whole days of work due to the time mismatch, and this still happens some days on @MarsCuriosity. 11/

It’s going to be a challenge working on Mars time remotely from home with our families, but we’ll do our best. A huge thank you in advance to my husband for putting up with the chaos!! 12/