Space agency tasked with establishing Coordinated Lunar Time, partly to aid missions requiring extreme precision
Archived version: https://archive.ph/ObWSZ
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.
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.
so atomic clocks on the moon would go out of sync over a long period compared to those on earth…
When you are measuring precise distance to the Moon using lasers, 50 microseconds is about 1.5 kilometers.
Except the light is also affected by time dilation so surely it wouldn’t matter.
It would only matter if you were measuring a distance between a satellite and the surface.
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.
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. :)
