Overview
- The offset varies by up to 226 microseconds per day through the Martian year because Mars’s orbital speed and gravitational environment change.
- NIST researchers anchored a fixed surface reference on Mars and used a four-body relativistic model of the Sun, Earth, Moon, and Mars informed by decades of mission data.
- The peer-reviewed results were published Dec. 1 in The Astronomical Journal, providing quantitative targets for off-world time standards.
- By comparison, clocks on the Moon show an approximately 56 microseconds per day difference relative to Earth clocks.
- The microsecond-scale benchmarks are intended to guide future synchronization for navigation and high-precision communications, even as Mars links still contend with 4–24 minute light-time delays.