When the latest Mars rover mission lands on the red planet Thursday, it will end seven years of hard work and planning by Sarah Fagents and propel the University of Hawaii at Manoa scientist on a whirlwind schedule that will require her to live her life on Mars time.

Because the Martian day is roughly 40 minutes longer than the Earth day, her workdays will shift daily and eventually cycle through the night and back around to days.

“Someone pointed out the other day that living on Mars time is like moving two time zones west every three days,” said Fagents, who will conduct her work at home because of the pandemic. “You feel constantly jet-lagged and can never quite catch up.”

Add in the fact that she’s a mother of 6-year-old twins and it probably means her Mars sojourn is going to be a rather taxing one — at least for the first few months or so, after which her schedule will revert to Earth time.

Fagents, a planetary volcanologist, is among a handful of UH colleagues and graduate students who are on the 200-plus-member scientific team of the Mars 2020 mission.

Perseverance, described as the most sophisticated rover NASA has ever sent to Mars, is scheduled to land at its destination Thursday after being launched in July from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Since being chosen for the NASA instrument teams in 2014, Fagents and her colleagues have been testing, developing and fine-tuning the scientific instruments that will search for clues about past life on Mars.

Built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Perseverance holds an arsenal of scientific instruments built to search for signs of ancient microbial life, characterize the planet’s geology and climate, and collect rock and sediment samples for a possible return trip to Earth.

Fagents, a researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, is the volcanologist for the team in charge of the Mastcam-Z, a mast-mounted multispectral camera with a powerful zoom capability. At maximum zoom setting, the camera can pick out a feature as small as a housefly across the length of a football field.

The team will use the camera to scan the rocky Martian landscape and identify rocks, soils and other targets worthy of closer examination.

UH colleague Shiv Sharma is co-investigator on a different instrument, SuperCam, which, among other things, operates a laser to zap rocks and soil to learn their composition.

A Manoa faculty member since 2002, Fagents was recruited to her job by Mastcam-Z team leader Jim Bell, an Arizona State University professor and planetary scientist who earned his graduate degrees at Manoa in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Fagents said she knew Bell from his days at Manoa, and he was familiar with her work.

“I’ve spent much of my career interpreting spacecraft images,” she said.

Fagents’ role will largely involve analysis of the Mastcam-Z images, helping to decide which rocky formations to target and what samples to take. Among other things, she will also help determine what the rock features indicate about the history of Martian volcanic eruptions.

While this will be the first rover to actually collect rocks and soil samples, they will be left on the surface of the planet for collection by a future mission when it’s feasible to carry them home.

Fagents said whether the evidence of past life exists in the Martian material will not be known until it is brought back to Earth and put under the scrutiny of sophisticated labs.

Scientists hope that the evidence will be found near the landing site: Jezero Crater, an ancient impact site that once held a lake at a time when the atmosphere of Mars was much warmer and wetter.

Fagents was part of the landing site selection effort in 2018, choosing Jezero over more than 60 sites. She said the crater is as good a place on Mars as any for the potential of finding evidence of ancient microbes.

Today the atmosphere of the red planet is extremely thin, and the surface is a bone-dry desert subject to day- and nighttime temperature extremes. For nearly two years Perseverance will meander around this barren landscape in a roughly 6-mile region.

As the 2020 launch date drew nearer, the coronavirus pandemic represented a real threat to the mission, the scientist said. There was real fear the launch wouldn’t take place. The window to launch a large payload to Mars, due to planetary alignment, is just three weeks out of every 26 months. That was a small window; otherwise, the mission would have had to wait two years.

“NASA pulled out all the stops, working around the clock to make it happen,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work.”

And in a normal year the research and engineering teams would gather to work at JPL in California. With COVID-19 the scientists are scattered around the world, doing their jobs remotely.

For Fagents, her role as volcanologist will be a full-time job. Preparing for this role has been demanding, and recently she has devoted a great deal of time wrapping up loose ends, taking care of previous commitments and freeing up the time she will need.

“I’m exhausted when I lie down at night, ” she said, “but I’m super excited. I’m also starting to feel the tension. I don’t think I’ll be able to breathe until the spacecraft has landed safely on the planet.”

Fagents said living on Mars time will be a huge challenge. But many on the Mars 2020 team have been through it before, and have been sharing tips and tricks on how to approach it, including detailed schedules of when to wake up, eat, exercise, work and sleep, depending on what time shifts start.

Other helpful tips: blackout shades, noise-canceling earplugs, light therapy lamps, vitamin D supplements, melatonin, judicious use of caffeine and having a freezer full of pre-prepared meals so one doesn’t have to cook dinner at 4 a.m.

The wild card in her schedule is having a pair of 6-year-olds (a boy and a girl) in the house. They might have other ideas for her time.

“We don’t have help and family is far, far away, but I do have a husband who also mainly works from home,” she said. “In pre-COVID times we would probably have engaged a sitter to help out, but here we are.”