Mars needs its own time zone! Scientists reveal clocks will tick 477 microseconds quicker on the Red Planet than on Earth
Forget Greenwich Mean Time or Eastern Daylight Time, scientists say we need a brand new time zone – for Mars.
That's because clocks on the Red Planet will tick 477 microseconds faster than those on Earth per day.
While that might sound small, this will add up to big effects over a long period of time, with Mars slipping 1.7 seconds ahead of Earth every decade, according to physicists from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
This strange fact is a consequence of Einstein's laws of general relativity, which show that time doesn't move at the same rate everywhere in the universe.
Time progresses more slowly in areas where gravity is strong and faster in areas where gravity's pull is weak.
On Mars, where the gravity is five times weaker than on Earth, this means astronauts will age slightly faster than their friends back home.
Although the difference is just one thousandth of the time it takes for you to blink, it could wreak havoc for Martian colonies' communication and navigation systems.
Co–author Dr Bijunath Patla, a physicist at NIST, says: 'Like current global navigation systems like GPS, these systems will depend on accurate clocks.'
Scientists say that Mars may need its own time zone as they calculate that clocks on the red planet will tick 477 microseconds faster than those on Earth per day.
477 microseconds is one thousandth of the time it takes for you to blink, but it could add up to cause big problems for the navigation systems used by rovers like Perseverance (pictured)
Even though scientists know the strength of Mars' gravitational pull at the planet's surface, working out how this affects the passage of time isn't easy.
That is because Mars is strongly influenced by the gravity of the solar system's other planets.
Unlike the Earth and moon, which orbit the sun in a circle, Mars' distance from the sun and its neighbours, including the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, pulls it into a more oval orbit.
This means the amount of gravity it experiences changes quite significantly over the course of a year.
Dr Patla says: 'A three–body problem is extremely complicated. Now we're dealing with four: the sun, Earth, the moon and Mars.
'Its distance from the sun and its eccentric orbit make the variations in time larger.'
In a single year, gravity from its celestial neighbours changes how fast clocks tick on Mars compared to Earth by as much as 226 microseconds a day.
By comparison, the researchers previously worked out that clocks on the moon would consistently tick about 56 microseconds per day faster than those on Earth.
On Earth, sensitive equipment relies on a measure called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is determined by ultra–precise atomic clocks around the world (pictured)
This might not initially seem like a big issue; after all, it would take over 344 years for clocks on Mars to get just a minute ahead of those on Earth.
But, as the researchers point out, even minor changes in timekeeping cause big issues for sensitive communications and navigation equipment.
5G networks, for example, need to be synchronised to within a tenth of a microsecond.
Likewise, satellite GPS systems work by measuring the time it takes for signals from multiple satellites to reach a receiver.
That means, if we want communication and navigation systems that are compatible between Earth and Mars, it is essential that we can agree on what the time is.
Although this isn't a problem right now, in the future, when the first Martian colonies start to form, it could become a more pressing issue.
Dr Patla says: 'It may be decades before the surface of Mars is covered by the tracks of wandering rovers, but it is useful now to study the issues involved in establishing navigation systems on other planets and moons.'
EINSTEIN'S GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY
Albert Einstein
In 1905, Albert Einstein determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and that the speed of light in a vacuum was independent of the motion of all observers - known as the theory of special relativity.
This groundbreaking work introduced a new framework for all of physics, and proposed new concepts of space and time.
He then spent 10 years trying to include acceleration in the theory, finally publishing his theory of general relativity in 1915.
This determined that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity.
At its simplest, it can be thought of as a giant rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the centre.
Pictured is the original historical documents related to Einstein's prediction of the existence of gravitational waves, shown at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem
As the ball warps the sheet, a planet bends the fabric of space-time, creating the force that we feel as gravity.
Any object that comes near to the body falls towards it because of the effect.
Einstein predicted that if two massive bodies came together it would create such a huge ripple in space time that it should be detectable on Earth.
It was most recently demonstrated in the hit film film Interstellar.
In a segment that saw the crew visit a planet which fell within the gravitational grasp of a huge black hole, the event caused time to slow down massively.
Crew members on the planet barely aged while those on the ship were decades older on their return.
