QUESTION:
I noticed that in some of the presentations by the Pathfinder team a "sol"
is broken up into "hours" and sometimes "minutes". At least one of the
charts implied that there were exactly 24 "hours" in a "sol" even though
there are more than (24 * 60 * 60) seconds to a "sol."

Is this merely an informal notion for the benefit of the presentation or is
there an "official" mapping of the length of a second (which I assume no
scientist would care to change) to the length of a martian "minute", "hour",
and/or "sol"?

ANSWER from Bruce Jakosky on July 16, 1997:
Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted scheme for defining local time
on Mars.  As a result, individual scientists have chosen whatever method
they like best.

The most common is to divide a martian day (a sol) into 24 even time
periods, and to refer to them as "hours".  By doing this, one can understand
intuitively what time of day is meant and where the sun is in the sky.

The meteorology teams on Pathfinder and, previously, on Viking (many are the
same people) divided the martian day into 25 even increments.  I understand
that the reason for this goes back to making some computer problems easier
to deal with.

Others use Earth hours, so that there are 24 hours and 37 minutes in a day.

All in all, it can get very confusing.