White House instructs NASA to develop lunar time standard

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will have to develop a new standard for lunar time for improved navigation in future missions.

Here's What We Know

This policy aims to standardise astronomical time, so NASA has until the end of 2026 to develop a strategy for creating coordinated lunar time (LTC). It will be based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on Earth and adapted to missions on the Moon.

Simply using UTC on the Moon is not suitable for precision operations. UTC is tied to Earth's systems, and a second on the Moon is not the same length as on Earth. For example, for a person on the planet's satellite, the Earth's clock will lose an average of 58.7 microseconds per Earth day, with additional periodic fluctuations.

Although this difference is imperceptible, it would take almost 50 years to create a true one-second offset. However, it is a problem for navigation. It is important for such tools to agree on a definition of time between operators in space. Such a standard would need to be accurate, robust to loss of communication with Earth, and scalable to environments beyond the Moon.

Source: Space News