by Missing a train or bus can ruin your day, but missing a ride home to Earth brings a whole different inconvenience.
Fortunately, NASA is moving forward with plans to implement a standardized time zone on the moon. The proposed Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) would be used to plan missions and explorations on the moon, making future attempts to establish some sort of permanent base on the lunar surface a little easier.
Although the idea has been discussed before, NASA says it will now work with the US government, commercial partners and international standards organizations to ensure we always know what time it is on the moon.
“As the commercial space industry grows and more countries operate on the moon, there is a greater need for time standardization,” said aerospace engineer Ben Ashman, who works on the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) team at NASA.
“A shared definition of time is an important part of safe, resilient and sustainable operations.”
NASA researchers want to use atomic clocks to tell the time on the moon, just as they are used on Earth. These clocks are based on the energy frequency that electrons need to change states in specific types of atoms, allowing us to keep time incredibly accurately.
There’s a catch, though: gravitational differences between Earth and the moon equate to differences in the length of each second, meaning timepieces on the moon’s surface will gain about 56 microseconds per day over those on Earth.
“For something moving at the speed of light, 56 microseconds is enough time to travel the distance of about 168 football fields,” said Cheryl Gramling, senior navigation systems engineer at NASA.
“If someone were orbiting the moon, an observer on Earth who did not compensate for the effects of relativity for a day would think that the orbiting astronaut is about 168 football fields away from where the astronaut is is actually located.”
Scientists are hard at work figuring out the mathematical models needed to solve this difficult problem and ensure that the watches of astronauts and ground controllers are better in sync.
Once these challenges are overcome, NASA scientists are confident that the system will scale up well enough to be useful across the solar system, and not just on the moon, which will be useful for planning those video calls to Mars on a day.
This development of coordinated lunar time is an essential part of the Artemis project, NASA’s effort to establish the first long-term human presence on the moon. The next astronaut journey to the lunar surface, with the first woman and the first person of color to set foot on the moon, is scheduled for 2026.
