2024-04-04 17:00:00
The White House has published a policy memorandum directing NASA to create a new lunar time standard by 2026. Lunar Coordinated Time (LTC) will establish an official time reference to help guide future lunar missions, arriving as the 21st century space race emerges between (at least) United States, China, Japan, India and Russia.
The memorandum directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to plan a strategy to put LTC into effect by December 31, 2026. International cooperation will also play a role, especially with signatories to the Artemis Accords. Established in 2020, these principles are a set of principles shared by A growing list of (currently) 37 countries governing the principles of space exploration and operation, and China and Russia are not part of this group.
“As NASA, private companies, and space agencies around the world launch missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it is important that we set time standards for safety and accuracy,” OSTP Deputy Director for National Security Steve Welby wrote in a letter.
In a press release from the House, he said, “Consistent definition of time between operators in space is critical to the success of space situational awareness, navigation, and communications capabilities, all of which are essential to enabling interoperability across the U.S. government and with international partners.”
Einstein’s theories of relativity say that time changes with respect to speed and gravity, and due to the Moon’s weaker gravity (and differences in motion between it and Earth), time moves a little faster there, so the Earth’s clock on the Moon appears to gain an average of 58.7 microseconds per Earth day.
As the United States and other countries plan missions to the Moon for research, exploration, and (eventually) building bases for permanent residence, using a single standard will help them synchronize technology and missions that require precise timing.
“The same clock on Earth will move at a different rate on the Moon,” NASA’s chief of communications and astronautics, Kevin Coggins, told Reuters. “Think of the atomic clocks at the US Naval Observatory (in Washington). They are the beating heart of the nation, coordinating everything, and you would want to have “On this matter on the moon.”
The White House wants LTC to coordinate with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the standard by which all time zones on Earth are measured.
Its memo says it wants the new time zone to enable precision navigation and scientific endeavors, and also wants the LTC to maintain its resilience if contact with Earth is lost while providing scalability to space environments “beyond the Earth-Moon system.”
NASA’s Artemis program aims to send manned missions to the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, and the space agency said in January that the Artemis 2 spacecraft, which will fly around the moon with four people on board, is now scheduled to launch in September 2025. The Artemis 3 mission, which plans to return humans to the moon’s surface, will be launched in 2026.
In addition to the United States, China aims to send astronauts to the moon before 2030, as the two global superpowers begin their race into space.
Although no other country has announced manned lunar missions, only India (which placed a module and rover on the lunar south pole last year), Russia (around the same time its mission did not go well), and the United Arab Emirates, have shown Japan, South Korea and private companies have lunar ambitions in recent years.
In addition to enabling further scientific exploration, technological establishment and resource extraction, the Moon could serve as a crucial stop on the way to Mars, and could test technologies and provide fuel and supply needs for eventual human missions to the Red Planet.
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