Zara Mirmalek Knihy

This book explores the collaboration of people, robots, processes, and intuitions in creating time on Mars. In 2004, NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers mission operated on "Mars time," with each rover having its own local time, impacting daily activities for over ninety days. This successful mission led to significant discoveries and highlights how time and work dynamics are influenced by cultural aspects, organizational structures, and historical contexts. While time is a common organizing principle in workplaces, its role becomes particularly intriguing in the context of a Mars mission, where familiar relationships are both strange and familiar. The author, a mission member, conducted a year-long ethnographic study at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, examining the interplay of time and work through an interdisciplinary lens that includes anthropology, communication, and science studies. The book covers the historical context of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) workplace, the dynamics between team members and robots, and the technology of time that organizes remote workgroups. It also addresses the limitations of the time/work relationship, professional identity, and human-robot interactions. The intent is to provide insight into a publicly funded project aimed at generating knowledge beneficial to all, while challenging assumptions about clock time as an immutable concept. It argues that the relationship between clock time an