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outdated.
