They live here on Earth, but for all practical purposes, they are Martians. To begin with, they have dispensed with the vulgar earthly driven 24-hour clock. Their day is martian, 24 hs 44' long, and it is not named day at all, it goes by the name of Sol. And it does not begin with the call of a Martian cock either.
Instead, the Sound Team may chose for Sol 53 (Feb 26 on Earth) "Dust in the wind" in anticipation of probable sightings of dust devils for Spirit, or "Trench Town Rock" by Bob Marley for Sol 24 (Feb. 18) when Opportunity pushed its instrument laden arm into a trench previously excavated by its right front wheel (Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat & Tears was the previous Sol theme).
Didn't realize music production was so prolific until noting for each and every Sol, for both Spirit and Opportunity; they could pull a theme from the discotheque closely matching current circumstances! And if the Sol numbers seem not to make sense, it's because they start from landing time for each rover.
Back to the teams, they really live by martian clocks; in fact, windows are taped over so as to block any cues about current earthly time. It's not as eccentric as it may seem. Mission projected lifetime for each rover is about 90 days, since dust deposition on their solar panels will slowly curtail energy resources until further operation is impossible.
And daily (soly?) operations are mandated by sunlight. At night, the rovers must live on batteries and save as much energy as possible. They wake up at dawn and - as any sensible rover should do - warm up for the workday ahead. Team members must therefore keep in sync with this rhythm and cannot afford to waist a single productive minute, for the almanac crawls relentlessly.
Working in these teams is akin to drinking from a fire hose while trying to spill no single drop. Six teams, one for each major instrument, and five experts teams for each major science area. Then, the engineering teams who must negotiate communications resources along with time and available energy, so as to build a command sequence for the next Sol.
Riding high performance workstations, sifting through hundreds of megabytes of daily data, they must react quickly, consult and make decisions for further actions, for this mission is only broadly defined in the sense of scientific goals and objectives.
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