A mind bomb in today’s NASA Mars press conference:

Q. Have any of you slept?

Pete: we slept for three years. I got 4 hours.

Arthur: I got about an hour last night.

Steve: landings are special. Once you get into Marstime, it’s fine. I got into the Gusev groove. I was getting 6,7, 8 hours sleep. What’s hard is changing rovers. The jump to Opportunity was a 12 hour time zone change and that’s hard. I’ve been sleeping in little 2 and 3 hours.

I already knew that the crew back on Earth is operating on Mars time, sleeping and waking as the Spirit rover does, with 24.6 hour days. What surprised me is now that Oppurtunity has landed on exactly the other side of the planet, they’ve had to switch their schedules 12 martian time zones to stay in sync. Whoa!

By the way, Asa Dotzler has the best Mars rovers coverage on the Internet.