The push button to go under up a " Lunar Coordinate Time " is profit traction . The International Astronomical Union ( IAU ) is the latest organization to call for the Moon to have its own standard clock time in a command to coordinate future lunar missions .
A move to establish a received Lunar Celestial Reference System and Lunar Coordinate Time was pass by by the IAU on August 15 at their XXXII General Assembly in Cape Town , South Africa . A follow - up resolution say the new time zone should be reached by “ international agreement " .
“ As we provide Cape Town and reflect on the bequest of this event , let us remember that together we are pushing the frontier of astronomical knowledge in a collective effort to well understand the Universe we inhabit in , our origins and our future , and to make the world a better position for all , ” Willy Benz , incoming President of the IAU , said in astatement .
There ’s currentlyno agree time zoneon the Moon – and that ’s a growing problem . Uncrewed missions typically use the time zone of the craft ’s country of origin , while the crewed Apollo missions from 1968 to 1972 used Ground Elapsed Time , counting from the import of launch .
With humans ( hopefully ) position to bring back to the Moon in the close future , plus anincreasing figure of nationsand private party launching space missions , the need to align the Moon with a unified clock is climb .
metre dilationthrows another spanner into the work . Due to general and particular relativity , the length of a second on the Moon will seem distorted to an observer on Earth because there ’s less gravity on the lunar surface and , therefore , time flows faster .
meter on the Moon ’s surface ticks an average of57.5 microsecondsper Earth - day faster than it does on our planet ’s surface . This may seem minuscule , but it could make a difference of opinion when highly accurate experiments are being impart . what is more , these tiny differences can add together up ; if an astronaut spends 50 days on the Moon , they would be around 1 second old than if they had stay on Earth .
give-and-take about a " Coordinated Lunar Time " have been building in recent clip . Back in April 2024 , theWhite House directed NASAand other means to put together a plan to establish a new Moon time arrangement by the end of 2026 .
While it ’s still unsettled how the world might go about doing this , it ’s apparent that this is the time to do so .
“ I think that the biotic community has realized that this require to be done . And this is the beginning , ” Bijunath Patla , a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology , toldthe Associated Press .
