Re: Interplanetary timekeeping

Jim McCauley wrote:


I bring this up every few years just to see if things have changed...

The task of managing the Spirit/Opportunity sciens adn engineering
teams
included making work schedule changes to accommodate the differences in

duration of terrestrial and Martian days. Early in the project, this
was
quite a challenge, as documented in a Nova special a few years ago.

Has this contributed anything useful to the prospect of establishing
standards for interplantary timekeeping? If humans ever move to other
worlds, especially the asteroids, this could become a significant
issue, both in practical issues like workforce management and novel matters
like the compounding of commercial interest on loans.

Computer tasks will probably be affected even more so than workforce
management. It seems inevitable that there will be some sort of an
interplanetary Internet (Extranet?), and its time servers (and most other
types of networked servers) are going to have a heck of a task managing
both time differences and different signal delays for packets going
to/from different planet destinations and even from different crafts being
on various distances from Earth.

Cheers,
D.





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