National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is working towards generating a unified time standard for the Moon. But what has led the space agency to come up with lunar standard time?
A new Moon-centric time reference system will be able to provide a benchmark for lunar spacecraft and satellites which need extreme precision. Hence, the White House has directed Nasa and other US agencies to work with international agencies to come up with a new moon-centric time reference system by 2026.
Need for Lunar Standard Time
Time moves quicker on the Moon - 58.7 microseconds every day as compared to Earth due to less gravity. According to Kevin Coggins, Nasa's top communication & navigation official, an atomic clock on the moon will tick at a different rate than a clock on Earth.
"It makes sense that when you go to another body, like the Moon or Mars that each one gets its own heartbeat. So everything on the Moon will operate on the speeded-up Moon time," he said.
Unlike on Earth, the moon will not have daylight saving time, Coggins said.
According to an official of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), discrepancies in time also could lead to errors in mapping and locating positions on or orbiting the Moon.
"Imagine if the world wasn’t syncing their clocks to the same time, how disruptive that might be and how challenging everyday things become," the official told Reuters.
What the White House memo says
The White House on Tuesday instructed Nasa to work with international agencies and come up with a new Moon-centric time reference system. It wants the US space agency to present the preliminary idea by the end of the year and be ready with a final plan by the end of 2026.
"As Nasa, private companies and space agencies around the world launch missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it's important that we establish celestial time standards for safety and accuracy," Steve Welby, White House OSTP deputy director for national security said.
"A consistent definition of time among operators in space is critical to successful space situational awareness capabilities, navigation and communications," Welby added.
Key focus of Lunar Standard Time
The new standard will primarily focus on four major features, including traceability to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), accuracy sufficient to support precision navigation and science, resilience to loss of contact with Earth and scalability to environments beyond cislunar space.
The aim, the White House says, is for Coordinate Lunar Time, or LTC, to be tied to UTC, currently the primary time standard used across the world to regulate time on Earth.
Moon missions
The United States is planning a return to the Moon in 2026, humanity's first lunar landing since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
The last time Nasa sent astronauts to the Moon they wore watches, but timing wasn't as precise and critical as it now with GPS, satellites and intricate computer and communications systems, Coggins said. "Those microseconds matter when high tech systems interact," he added.
Other countries such as China, Russia and even India plans to land astronauts on the Moon in the near future and establish a long-term presence with research bases.
Last year, the European Space Agency said Earth needs to come up with a unified time for the Moon, where a day lasts 29.5 Earth days.
The International Space Station, being in low Earth orbit, will continue to use coordinated universal time or UTC. But just where the new space time kicks in is something that Nasa has to figure out. Even Earth's time speeds up and slows down, requiring leap seconds.
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