Time is different on the moon – we just don’t know how to pass it to a clock. But it is urgent that we do it. For NASA, there is a time limit to create a new time: December this year.
On the lunar surface, a single terrestrial day would be about 56 microseconds shorter than on our planet, explains the. It sounds little, but in the long run it can completely deregulate the whole notion of time.
That is why, now, scientists try to create a kind of “Lunar time zone” – A whole new scale of time that obeys the laws of the moon.
The US government is concerned about this measurement, which has not yet been found. Therefore, it has given NASA a deadline: they have until December 31 to create this lunar time zone, and by 2026 to apply it.
“When navigating the moon, Time has to be relative to the moon ”says Cheryl Gramling, leader of lunar position, navigation, timing and standards at NASA’s Goddard space flight center.
Increasingly, we try the watches to be exact. Scientist Bruce Betts jokes: “Cursed be Einstein – he invented the overall relativity and it resulted in many strange things. One of them is that gravity slows down the time.” And you’re right: thanks to the unmistakable Albert Einstein, we have the notion that gravity affects time.
To account for the effects of general relativity on Earth, scientists have already installed a few hundred in various parts of the world to detect tiny differences between them.
“If you researched time on Earth, it has been realized that it is a critical factor for everything: the economy, food security, trade, the financial community and even oil exploration. Precise clocks are used,” says NASA’s program of communications and navigation program, Kevin Coggins. “ANDthis present in everything that is important in modern society ”.
On the moon, with the increasingly intense presence of man, this temporal measurement also becomes essential.
An exception is the International Space Station. Although orbite the Earth322 kilometers above the surface, it travels very fast, at an average speed of 27 700 km/h, completing 15.70 orbits per day, which almost completely nullifies the effects of relativity-this season’s astronauts can therefore follow the terrestrial times.
As spaceships, for example, are equipped with their own watches, called oscillatorsConta grammes.
Most of our spaceship operations – even those in Pluto or Na, such as – depend on land stations on Earth. Therefore, everything they are doing has to be correlated with the UTC (coordinated universal time) ”.
But it is necessary to create a lunar time, and not just continue to guide us for the land, the investigators explain. “We have to solve all this“Says Gramling.“ I don’t think we don’t know how. I think it will be an amalgam of several different things. ”
The project may, however, cost millions of dollars. The confusion is still very much: “NASA is talking about landing astronauts in the interesting region of the southern pole of the moon, where there are permanently illuminated and permanently shaded areas.
“It will be a challenge,” he concludes, but there is already talk of doing the same, for example, on Mars. It’s all a matter of time.
