The Moon is getting its own time zone

NASA-associated physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently created Coordinated Lunar Time, a time zone for our Moon. Can’t wait to see how watchmakers work that into a GMT.

Why is it needed? As the US and other countries aim to return humans to the Moon and establish a permanent presence there, coordinated and ultra-precise timekeeping is imperative to ensure things like reliable communication with Earth and safe spacecraft maneuvers, Science reports.

It’s actually a challenging task

On Earth, atomic clocks are used to keep precise time. They’re placed all over the globe and in orbit, and measure time’s passage by monitoring the resonant frequency of atoms. These clocks are a technology Swiss Army Knife of sorts, enabling many of the innovations we rely on today, especially GPS.

But bringing Google Maps to the lunar surface isn’t a plug-and-play, since Earth time can’t just be mapped onto the Moon.

• A lunar day and lunar night each last two Earth weeks, and, due to relativity, seconds tick by slightly faster than they do on our home planet – 56.02 microseconds/day faster, to be exact.
• But while small, this discrepancy can add up to significant inconsistencies over time – causing spacecraft to land dozens of feet away from their intended targets, for example.

The solution: Creating a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) that acts similar to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on Earth.

NIST researchers propose placing communication satellites – basically space telephone poles – between the Earth and Moon in Lagrange points, relatively stable areas in space where objects don’t wander off. These satellites would beam transmissions back and forth, and be programmed to keep everything synchronized between the two celestial bodies.

👀 Looking ahead… An April memo from the White House directs NASA to map out its plans for a new lunar time scale by December 31, then implement them over the next two years, calling the project “foundational” to renewed US efforts to explore the lunar surface. NASA aims to put humans on the Moon in 2026 – and on Mars, which will also need its own time zone, sometime in the 2030s.