NASA has announced plans to standardize the temporal readings for our lunar cousin by developing an official Coordinated Lunar Time measurement, or CLT. That's right: it's a time zone for the moon.
"The existence of a common time reference is the basis of our everyday life activities on Earth, and the same will be true on the Moon with the development of a lunar economy and the expansion of lunar exploration," Javier Ventura-Traveset, Moonlight Project navigation manager at the European Space Agency (ESA), told Newsweek.
"In a very short term, for example, we may need to define a common lunar reference time to ensure that different space agencies' planned lunar-based communication and navigation infrastructures remain interoperable; to establish growing lunar telecommunication networks; to precisely time-stamp some scientific experiments; to synchronize astronomical observations from lunar-based telescopes; or to coordinate time-sensitive operations such as spacecraft docking."
Newsweek
As Vice points out, Coordinated Lunar Time will eventually come in handy for the blossoming commercial space industry, assuming that Virgin Galactic and/or SpaceX do eventually get their lunar colony spaceflight business all up and running.
There is a catch, however: how, exactly, do you measure time on a celestial body with a different orbital cycle from our own? Also from Vice:
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.
Previously:
• NASA plans to grow mushroom houses on the moon
