Making Time on Mars

Zara Mirmalek (Postdoctoral Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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English

MIT Press
07 April 2020

Time (chronology), time systems & standards; Space science

Series: Inside Technology

An examination of how the daily work of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers was organized across three sites on two planets using local Mars time.

In 2004, mission scientists and engineers working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) remotely operated two robots at different sites on Mars for ninety consecutive days. An unusual feature of this successful mission was that it operated on Mars time-the daily work was organized across three sites on two planets according to two Martian time zones. In Making Time on Mars, Zara Mirmalek shows that this involved more than a resetting of wristwatches; the team's struggle to synchronize with Mars time involved technological and communication breakdowns, informal workarounds, and extra work to support the technology that was intended to support people. Her account of how NASA created an entirely new temporality for the MER mission offers insights about the assumptions behind the organizational relationship between clock time and work. Mirmalek, herself a member of the mission team, offers an insider's view of the MER workplace and community. She describes the discord among MER's multiple temporalities and examines issues of professional identity that helped shape the experience of working according to Mars time. Considering time and work relationships through a multidisciplinary lens, Mirmalek shows how contemporary and historical human-technology relationships inform assumptions about the unalterability of clock time. She argues that the organizational connection between clock time and work, although still operational, is outdated.

By: Zara Mirmalek (Postdoctoral Associate Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 13mm
ISBN: 9780262043854
ISBN 10: 0262043858
Series: Inside Technology
Pages: 212
Publication Date: 07 April 2020
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Zara Mirmalek is a Research Scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at NASA Ames Research Center and Senior Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.