1y ago

Moon Standard Time? Nasa to create lunar-centric time reference system

www.theguardian.com

Space agency tasked with establishing Coordinated Lunar Time, partly to aid missions requiring extreme precision

Archived version: https://archive.ph/ObWSZ

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Unlike on Earth, the moon will not have daylight saving time, Coggins said
I don’t know why but the idea that there might be daylight savings time on the moon is hilarious.
- Maybe if the Moon rotated like Earth it would be a thought but you can't really save daylight when it's tidally locked hmmm
  Daylight savings sucks anyway
  
  Any particular spot on the moon does have a day-night cycle, and the length of that does vary throughout the lunar year. Lunar daylight savings here we come!
Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad more quickly – 58.7 microseconds every day – compared to on Earth.
Okay, that's even cooler than I thought.
- When you are measuring precise distance to the Moon using lasers, 50 microseconds is about 1.5 kilometers.
I wonder how they'll end up implementing it. If it's going to forever drift apart from Earth time/UTC it feels problematic as well.
- I mean, that's just physics for you. Because gravity influences time, any extraterrestrial colony is going to have at least a slight difference in a seconds duration compared to earth.
  For the average person, the slight difference in the length of a second will probably be unnoticeable. Any differences would likely be overshadowed by the length of a day, season or year, assuming the planet in question even experiences those naturally. For an example, tidally-locked planets don't have natural days.
  It would potentially pose problems for time-sensitive scientific research. However, that could be resolved by creating an independent time standard based on outside phenomenon, like pulses from a neutron star, and then creating conversion tables for different colonies. I'm guessing that might be what NASA ends up doing, though there could be issues with that method that I'm unaware of.
- Our satellites always drift and need to be corrected, though I guess they don't exactly have a time zone?
USAonce again looking for units not used by anyone else /j
Hear the programmers groan
Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad more quickly – 58.7 microseconds every day – compared with on Earth.
I thought time dilation was caused by bodies moving at high speeds relative to one another, not differences in gravity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation
Hey, it’s 6am and I learned something new today. :)

13 comments