Clocks on the moon are faster than on Earth.. The European Space Agency wants a "moon reference time"
The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to define lunar time zones where humans are set to work and eventually live on the moon.
The idea has been around since last year, but the European Space Agency and international partners are pressing ahead with the process of creating a "common lunar reference time" accepted by all spacefaring nations.
Currently, the moon mission operates according to the time of the country that operates the spacecraft.
The team looking at lunar time is debating whether one organization should set and maintain lunar time, but they are investigating a technical issue.
Clocks run faster on the Moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day and ticking differently on the Moon than in lunar orbit.
And perhaps most importantly, lunar time should be practical for the astronauts there, noted Bernhard Hoffenbach of the space agency.
This news comes as many countries are looking forward to launching missions to the moon, especially the US Space Agency.
NASA is looking forward to 2025 as the year to return humans to the moon - the first time in more than 50 years.
This is part of the Artemis programme, which completed the first phase late last year. The next installment is Artemis II, which will send NASA astronauts on a trip around the moon in 2024.
Hoffenbach said in a statement: “This will be a great challenge, as each day lasts 29.5 Earth days. But now that we have established a timing system to work on the lunar surface, we can proceed to do the same for other planetary destinations.”
Talks to set a specific time for the moon were brought up last year during a meeting at the European Space Agency's ESTEC technology center in the Netherlands.
European space officials said the internationally accepted lunar time zone would make it easier for everyone, mainly because more countries and even private companies are targeting the moon and NASA is preparing to send astronauts there.
And NASA had to deal with the issue of time while designing and building the International Space Station, as the 25th anniversary of the launch of its first piece approached.
While the space station does not have its own time zone, it operates in Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which is based precisely on atomic clocks.
This helps split the time lag between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and other partner space programs in Russia, Japan and Europe.
“Interoperability of time and geodetic reference frames has been successfully achieved here on Earth for global navigation satellite systems; All smartphones today are able to take advantage of the existing GNSS system to calculate the user's location down to the meter or even decimeter level.
The experience of this success can be reused for future technical long-range lunar systems, although stable timekeeping on the moon will present its own unique challenges – such as taking into account the fact that time passes at a different time due to the effects of gravity and the specific velocity of the moon.”
Source : websites