[X] My Assistant

[dmuller]

Upon request from someone here at UMSF I have created some quick and dirty Mars Clocks for MER-A,B,PHX at http://www.dmuller.net/mars Trying to verify my results, however, I found that virtually every Mars clock provided on the net gives a different time. So which one is correct?

As for the calculation, the way I understand it, all that is required is:

1. The Earth UTC time of midnight on the landing spot of the spacecraft (i.e. SOL 0, 00:00:00 - or SOL 1 00:00:00 for the MERs)
2. Calculating from that base using that 1 Mars second has 1027.49125 Earth milliseconds

I have not found any references to (1), so I trial&error until my results match one of the more official looking Mars clocks. But ... which one is the correct / appropriate one?

[djellison]

The someone was me It makes a great replacement for web-clip chunks of different websites I've taken to try and keep on top of things. Mars 24 is all-powerful BUT a resource hog ( seriously - the Mac version gets the fans on my MBP racing!! ).

Only problem is it's online only. If we can nail the local-time issues, package it up for offline use, I know a whole bunch of people who would find it useful

[dmuller]

Only problem is it's online only. If we can nail the local-time issues, package it up for offline use, I know a whole bunch of people who would find it useful

No problem, functionality has been built in the script all the time (I forgot to tell about it, though) ... just load it as http://www.dmuller.net/realtime/mars.php?offline=true (same url as for online viewing, just add ?...) and then in your browser choose "Save Page As ... web-page, complete ... and give it a .htm or .html suffix". Let me know if it causes issues, and visit the online version occasionally in case there are updates.

I made a minor change to the Mars Clocks, however, and they now update more frequently than at the previous 1 second interval.

The things with my scripts being based on server time (which requires more programming than having it on browser time) has a long history back to MEX MOI / Beagle2 EDL. I was in some sort of discussion with some ESA IT staff, and they said that their policy (then) was not to have javascripts because anything time based could go haywire if the user's browser time is off ... so I developed a small personal php script (I dont think ESA ever took it ) to deal with that, and it still lives on. Needless to say, at that time I did not know about UMSF and its predecessors!

EDIT: I probably should put the download instructions on the website itself, or provide another one-click solution. I'll try working on it tonite ...