Missing a train or bus can ruin your day, but missing a ride home to Earth is on a whole other level of inconvenience.
Fortunately NASA is pushing ahead with plans to introduce a standardized time zone on the Moon. The proposed Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) would be used to schedule missions and explorations on the Moon, making future efforts to establish some kind of permanent base on the lunar surface a little simpler.
Though the idea has been discussed before, NASA says it’s now going to work with the US government, commercial partners, and international standards organizations to make sure we always know what time it is on the Moon.
“As the commercial space industry grows and more nations are active on the Moon, there is a greater need for time standardization,” says aerospace engineer Ben Ashman, who works in the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) team at NASA.
“A shared definition of time is an important part of safe, resilient, and sustainable operations.”
The researchers at NASA want to use atomic clocks to tell the time on the Moon, in the same way they’re used on Earth. These clocks are based on the energy frequency required for electrons to change state in specific types of atoms, allowing us to keep track of time to an incredibly precise degree.
There’s a problem though: Gravitational differences between Earth and the Moon equate to differences in the length of each second, meaning timepieces on the lunar surface will gain about 56 microseconds per day on the terrestrial ones.
“For something traveling at the speed of light, 56 microseconds is enough time to travel the distance of approximately 168 football fields,” says Cheryl Gramling, a senior navigation systems engineer at NASA.
“If someone is orbiting the Moon, an observer on Earth who isn’t compensating for the effects of relativity over a day would think that the orbiting astronaut is approximately 168 football fields away from where the astronaut really is.”
Scientists are hard at work figuring out the mathematical models required to solve this difficult problem and to make sure that the watches of astronauts and ground control operators are in better sync.
Once these challenges are overcome, NASA scientists are confident that the system will scale up well enough to be useful across the whole of the Solar System, not just the Moon, which will be handy for scheduling those video calls to Mars one day.
This development of Coordinated Lunar Time is an essential part of the Artemis project, NASA’s efforts to establish the first long-term human presence on the Moon. The next astronaut trip to the lunar surface, involving the first woman and first person of color to set foot on the Moon, is scheduled for 2026.
