NASA—and pretty much every other major space program on Earth—has plans to colonize the moon at some point. Who knows when that’ll be? It could be far down the line, but NASA is already getting a head start by working out some minor details like establishing a reliable time standard for lunar operations. That’s why NASA has moved ahead with plans to develop a CLT, or Coordinated Lunar Time. A time zone just for the moon.
It sounds silly, but if you plan to have people living in habitats on the moon, it would make sense if you’ve established some sense of time independent of earthly time so anyone living on it can enjoy the benefits of precise navigation and communication between the moon and Earth. It will also eventually be used by the commercial space industry when/if companies like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX get commercial spaceflight up and running.
Of course, the idea presents a ton of challenges.
Gravitational differences between the Earth and the moon affect how time is measured. On Earth, we use atomic clocks due to their superior precision. But the moon’s weaker gravity makes clocks tick faster by about 56 microseconds per day. That sounds like nothing, but it adds up and can cause significant navigation and mission synchronization problems. That teeny tiny little time difference could make all the difference in determining whether an astronaut floating in space could be exactly where they say they are or whether they are miles from where they should be.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology proposed a lunar time framework that would function kind of like the UTC, or coordinated universal time, here on Earth. It would make sure that all lunar clocks are synchronized so everyone on the moon is working on the same schedule.
The idea is to put a bunch of atomic clocks on the lunar surface and in orbit, which would work independently of Earth-based systems but still remain traceable to UTC.
And, of course, all of this will just be practice for when we’ll have to do all this again for Mars colonization even further down the line. After all, time is one of the most fundamental elements of our conception of reality. If you’re going to establish a new reality on another planet, you’ve got to rewrite the rules.
The post NASA Is Going to Give the Moon a Time Zone appeared first on VICE.
The post NASA Is Going to Give the Moon a Time Zone appeared first on VICE.
