Living on Mars time, 24.7/7
PASADENA, Calif. -- Like vampires-in-training, the scientists sleep in rooms with blackout shades. They wear strange wristwatches that sometimes tell them it's the middle of the night when the rest of the world is eating lunch. Some have been known to go food shopping at 2 a.m. and then take a jog after they put the groceries away.
More than 250 scientists working on the Mars Spirit rover mission are living on Mars time, a phenomenon that is creating one of the worst cases of collective jet lag on record. The time it takes for Mars to rotate on its axis -- the length of a day -- is 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than Earth's rotation, so scientists must adjust their schedule that much later every day to keep up with Spirit. The shifting hours may seem like a nice excuse to sleep in at first, but by the time the three-month mission is over, scientists will have moved through the Earth day two full times and be coming around again.
Deeply concerned about fatigue errors, NASA scientists asked top sleep experts for tips -- but in a twist of events, the scientists are now the subjects of an experiment themselves. By wearing tiny activity monitors, they are helping sleep experts understand exactly what bodies do when waking up at different times each day for months on end. Meanwhile, other more controlled experiments are going on in Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, with sequestered subjects living even more strictly on Mars time to research how they may adapt to it.
As early as tomorrow, President Bush is expected to announce a permanent manned science station on the moon that could serve as a steppingstone for astronauts to reach Mars. And while the sleep research may help that effort, it will likely have more immediate meaning for millions of earthlings who suffer jet lag, shift work fatigue, and disruptive sleep rhythms.
Lack of sleep has been linked to health ailments, diminished memory, and on-the-job errors. If researchers can somehow train a body how to abide by a different circadian rhythm, it could go a long way toward ensuring a good night's sleep for everyone.
"There are lots of implications for people on Earth," said Charles Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. This week, Czeisler will present research to the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Texas that shows sequestered Boston research subjects were able to adjust to martian time by being given two doses of light therapy late in the martian day.
The Mars scientists may be surviving now on adrenaline, but their fatigue is expected to balloon as they repeatedly leave at the end of a martian day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here and walk out into the California sunshine. On Jan. 25, things will get worse: Spirit's twin, Opportunity, will land on the other side of the planet in a different time zone, forcing scientists who want to keep up with both rovers to switch hours again and again.
It was pure exhaustion on the Mars rover Sojourner mission in 1997 that made scientists realize they needed some sleep advice. Then, the two-foot rover defied all odds and lasted a month. After four weeks of working 12- to 20-hour days to take advantage of the unprecedented opportunity, scientists crashed. "We couldn't do it anymore, we had a mutiny," said Albert Haldemann, deputy project scientist for the Spirit mission who also worked on Sojourner. "We pretty much went 9 to 5 after that. It's really, really hard to live on Mars time."
Since then, sleep experts from Brown, Stanford, and Harvard universities and the NASA Ames Fatigue Countermeasures Group in California have given a slew of advice to scientists, mostly about limiting light exposure when they get off work -- because light can reset internal clocks and keep scientists awake when they need to sleep. Visiting scientists have blackout shades in their rented apartments, while NASA insists key workers abide by a strict work schedule with specific days off to rest. The Mars team members were also given specially designed Mars watches, and NASA even created a nap room for the team to take 15-minute power naps. "We learned that sleeping on the job is not necessarily a bad thing," Haldemann said.
About 35 of the Mars scientists, including Haldemann, are wearing tiny accelerometers on their wrists that mark every motion the scientists make and keep track of when they go to sleep and for how long. Scientists also keep voluntary logs to note when they tried to go to sleep. It's basic information, but Dr. Melissa Mallis, from the Fatigue Countermeasures Group, is collecting this data for the first time in an operational environment -- as opposed to a controlled laboratory -- in part to create better work and sleep schedules for future Mars travelers and scientists on the ground.
Meanwhile, Czeisler and Kenneth Wright Jr. from the University of Colorado at Boulder just began a three-year study that aims to individually sequester up to a dozen people for 73 days each at the Brigham to further study the effects of the martian day on biological rhythms. While great publicity has centered on melatonin, the chemical that governs the sleep/wake cycle, to help those on earth fall asleep, these scientists believe light holds far greater promise by giving the body cues to adjust to different time zones or clocks, be it in Moscow or on Mars.
"Light is like a drug, the timing of it determines the nature of the response," Czeisler said. Too much of it when you are supposed to go to sleep may keep people awake.
But even with the help of sleep specialists, life for these scientists is bound to get harder as the weeks roll by -- and bills still need to be paid and children cared for.
"You can put off a lot of things for a month, but not for this long," said Matthew Golombek, a Sojourner alumnus whose work on the rover mission is expected to continue for several months. "The really hard thing is never really knowing what time it is."
Beth Daley can be reached by email at bdaley@globe.com
