[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by KSig RC

Actually, the human body has become accustomed, through centuries of acclimation, to a 24-hour clock. While there are also other related issues (such as the effects of sunlight on production of serotonin, for example), there's literally no good reason to keep time in "Mars time" for a basic exploration. It's likely more useful to keep a 24-hour schedule to prevent a sort of hyper-jet lag (especially considering how much the body would wither with 9 months of zero gravity) - a watch would be very useful, much more so than calibrating time to an astronomical idea of a "Mars day."

Ksig RC, this makes sense, but I was thinking that since the Martian year is 669 Martian days (or 686 Earth days) wouldn't we need to be on it's time? Once they arrived on Mars, since Earth and Mars are constantly moving, they would have to stay (more than likely) at least 550 days on the Martian surface before their return launch window opens up. I was just thinking since they would be there that long, the correct Martian time would be needed.

I agree with you about the effect of zero gravity, but what about the Soviet cosmonauts, many of whom have spent a lot of time in zero gravity on their Mir space station of over 6 months and some for over 18 months, nearly three times the duration of a mission to Mars. I was just thinking that in all cases, near total recovery of the musculature and immune system occurs after reentry and reconditioning to a one gravity environment on Earth. They could probably recover in a few days.