A group of tired engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looked at a wall of screens on a cold night.
The Perseverance rover was only a few milliseconds “late.” Not a big deal for a person. A huge deal for a robot that is exploring a new world.
The data showed that Mars time and Earth time were getting farther apart every day.
Not by magic or a broken machine, but just like a German physicist with crazy hair wrote on chalkboards a hundred years ago.
It was called by Einstein.
Mars had just made it clear.
Time itself was changing the rules for our future space missions.
When Martian dust meets Einstein’s equations
Go outside at sunset and watch the sky slowly change to orange.
On Mars, the same moment lasts a little longer. The sky turns a deeper red, the sun gets smaller, and a Martian “second” quietly walks out of sync with ours.
Einstein thought that time would not move the same way in all places.
The universe’s rhythm changes based on how far away from big things you are, how fast you are moving, and how much gravity you have. That difference is very small on Earth, and only atomic clocks in high-tech labs can tell. On Mars, where the distance is millions of kilometres and the gravity is less strong, the gap starts to become a daily problem.
That’s not just abstract physics anymore.
Every mission planner will have a hard time with that calendar.
We’ve all been there: when your phone, laptop, and smartwatch all disagree on what time it is.
Now picture the same mess spread out over two planets and a 15-minute delay in light.
The famous “sol” on Mars lasts about 24 hours and 39 minutes. Almost like Earth, but still very different. Spacecraft teams have been living on “Mars time” for months, moving their workday by 40 minutes every night. While their families stick to Earth clocks, they live like ghosts in Pasadena who have jet lag.
When you add Einstein’s relativistic effects, which are small changes in time caused by Mars’ weaker gravity and its slightly different speed around the Sun, those differences add up.
The schedule breaks after a few months or years.
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, time moves more slowly in stronger gravity.
When you get closer to a big object, clocks move a little slower. Time moves a little slower on Earth than it does on Mars because our gravity is stronger.
This means that an ultra-accurate clock on Mars won’t match up perfectly with its twin on Earth. The difference is small but never-ending. It doesn’t matter for casual conversation. It matters a lot for autonomous landing sequences, precise navigation, and making sure that communications work across a growing Martian network.
*Relativity, which used to be a philosophical problem, is about to become a line item in project budgets.*
It’s no longer possible for future missions to just “convert” Earth and Mars time with a simple formula. They will have to talk to the universe itself.
Making plans for a planet where time doesn’t work right
Engineers are already working on the next set of mission clocks.
Imagine a small physics lab attached to a spacecraft instead of a watch.
The plan is to send very stable atomic clocks on orbiters and landers around Mars and then connect them to a special “Martian Time Network.” Each clock keeps track of both the local time and the difference in time between Earth and the clock. As a rover moves into a crater or up a hill, its systems will make small adjustments for changes in gravity and orbital motion so that navigation algorithms don’t drift.
In practice, that means that a mission will start with a full time-keeping system, not just a countdown and an alarm clock to wake up.
Mars gets its own official time standard, which Einstein sets.
A lot of people still plan Mars operations with spreadsheets, custom scripts, and brains that are a little bit fried.
Let’s be honest: no one really does this every day with the neat, clean, and precise way you see in PowerPoint decks.
Future crews won’t have that luxury. The first people to live on Mars will have to keep track of Earth time, mission time, local solar time, and relativistic corrections while trying to grow potatoes and not get bored or die in dust storms. It would be a big mistake to think of these time changes as unimportant. They pile up. They mess up scientific experiments, managing power, and even medical routines like sleep cycles and drug dosing.
So the way of thinking has to change early on.
You can’t “adapt later” to a different flow of time. From day one, you plan for it.
As one mission planner joked quietly in a hallway at JPL, “Mars doesn’t care what time it is in California.” Einstein powers Mars.
To make that dark joke into a real system, space agencies are looking into a set of very specific tools:
- Dedicated atomic clocks on orbiters to keep track of local time
- All future missions will use the same “Mars Coordinated Time” (MTC).
- Software on board that automatically makes relativistic changes
- Mission schedules based on Martian sols instead of Earth days
- Astronauts can easily see the time on both Earth and Mars without getting confused.
Some of this already exists on Earth in GPS; our navigation satellites are always correcting for relativity.
The twist is that we’re now sending that hidden trick to a whole new world.
What Martian time means for you, me, and the next hundred years
The idea that time isn’t universal is a little unsettling.
You learn as a child that a second is a second no matter where you are, from your kitchen to the edge of the galaxy. “Not quite,” Mars says as it taps you on the shoulder.
As we spread out into the Solar System, these small differences will affect more than just engineering. A child born in a Martian settlement might have birthdays on a day that is a little longer than on Earth, and the sky might not follow the same schedule as it does on Earth. Just like we need currency converters now, we’ll need time glossaries for contracts, broadcasts, and even live calls between planets.
**The future isn’t just on other planets. It’s inter-time. Once people start to live, love, and grow old on a world where the clock moves differently, our sense of “now” will slowly change.
| Key point | Detail | Value for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Einstein’s prediction in practice | Time runs at a slightly different rate on Mars due to its gravity and orbit | Helps you grasp why “relativity” isn’t abstract, but a daily factor in future space travel |
| Mars-specific time systems | Development of atomic clocks, Mars Coordinated Time, and relativistic software corrections | Shows how technology will adapt so missions — and later settlers — can function safely |
| Impact on human life and culture | Different day length, scheduling, experiments, and even social rituals on Mars | Invites you to imagine how our idea of time, work, and routine might evolve beyond Earth |
Questions and Answers:
Will relativity make people age differently on Mars?
A little bit, but not in a sci-fi way. Because Mars has less gravity, time moves a little faster there than on Earth. Over a lifetime, the difference would be very small—only a few seconds, not years.
Is the longer day the main reason why time is different on Mars?
The longer sol is the most obvious change in everyday life. The relativistic effect from gravity and orbital motion is smaller, but it’s very important for navigation, communication, and precise science.
Are space agencies already taking relativity into account when planning missions?
Yes. Deep-space missions already take relativity into account when planning their paths and timing, just like GPS satellites do. As we plan long-term bases on Mars, those changes will become more important and regular.
Is it possible for Mars to have its own official time zones like Earth?
Most likely. There are already plans for “Mars Coordinated Time” and possible local zones for major landing sites or cities, all of which would be connected by orbital clocks and ground networks.
Can we travel through time using Mars?
Not in the way films do. There are real but very small time differences between Earth and Mars. They don’t let you go back or forward in time; they just show that clocks in the universe never quite agree.
