No human has yet set foot on Mars, but at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, dozens of NASA's top planetary scientists are bracing for their first case of "Martian jetlag."
About 150 scientists and some 170 engineers at the NASA planetary center in Pasadena, California, will be needed to manage two lawnmower-sized robots called the Mars Exploration Rovers now destined for the Red Planet.
One problem for the scientists back on Earth is that a Martian day is 24 hours and 39.5 minutes long. Since the rovers run on solar power, they will wake up each day with the sunrise. The humans will work on the rover schedule.
"Back home on Earth, people on the project are going to shift 39-and-a-half minutes every day," said Joy Crisp, a project scientist. After about five weeks, the teams will have shifted all the way back to their starting point, she noted to reporters in a briefing on the mission.
"We consulted with fatigue counter-measure experts, we've had training and implemented measures to minimize the effect of what we call Martian jetlag," Crisp said.
The first rover is to launch aboard a Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, today, weather permitting, and the second is set to lift off on June 25, with both reaching Mars within weeks of one another in January.
NASA has high hopes for the rovers, which will send back the most detailed pictures ever taken of the Martian landscape if they land safely.
Further complicating matters, the rovers will be on opposite sides of the planet, meaning the scientists will be split into teams working in different time zones.
The space agency considers this a high risk mission.
Of some 30 Mars expeditions mounted by various nations, only 12 have so far been successful. Two others, from Japan and Europe, are still en route.
Of nine attempts to actually land on the surface, only three have succeeded.
Although the planet offers plenty of danger itself -- dust storms frequently sweep its face and spacecraft have simply disappeared after entering its atmosphere -- some of the problems have been self-inflicted.
NASA lost one 1998 mission because the agency failed to take into account that some calibrations had been made in metric, some in English standard.
NASA has redesigned its MARS program from the ground up since that humiliating mishap, and the agency is counting on the twin rovers' US$800 million mission to put them back on course.
"We have done everything humanly possible to eliminate as many risks as possible on this mission, but Mars is still the death planet. It's a graveyard for many, many spacecraft," said Ed Weiler, NASA's chief space scientist.
The rovers are designed to spend at least three months searching for evidence of water, either past or present, on the Martian surface inside its rocks. NASA plans to send robotic laboratories to Mars by the end of the decade.
Weather back on Earth poses a problem at the launch site. Today's forecast calls for a 60 percent chance of thunderstorms.
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