Follow Mars Rover Operations With SpaceTime for Android

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NASA SpaceTime is an Android app for displaying the time on Mars and the schedule of the operations teams of NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory runs the missions and developed this official app.

NASA SpaceTime on a Pixel 4 XL phone
The NASA SpaceTime app on my Pixel 4 XL phone.


The app shows the local time at the rover sites on Mars along with a list of upcoming events, planning activities, and key meetings of the mission operations teams. The entries provide the times at your location and countdowns to the events.

The descriptions of the entries are terse and worded with obscure acronyms, so it may be hard to figure what they’re about. Ex Mars rover driver Scott Maxwell helped me make sense of the acronyms and jargon. Here’s what they mean. Keep this list handy when running the app:

  • Ace: call sign of the team member who triggers the uplink, among other things
  • CI: Campaign Integration (the equivalent of Curiosity's supratactical process)
  • D/L: downlink
  • EDR: Experiment Data Record
  • EOP: End of Pass
  • Last Bit time: the time when the last bit of a downlink will be received on Earth
  • LTP: Long-Term Planning
  • N+1: planning is lookahead; planning sol N while thinking about N+1
  • PDC: Payload Downlink Coordinator
  • RDR: Reduced Data Record
  • UL: Uplink

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