If they're going to bother creating a time measurement system for the moon they might as well just invent the Stardate already and use that for everything we do in space from now on regardless of where we are.
Apparently, TAI specifically defines the second (in terms of cesium transitions) at sea level (where gravitational potential is equal). I never knew that second part.
Accuracy counts.
"... a moon-centric time reference system that accounts for its differing gravitational forces. In a memo on Tuesday, OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar noted that Earth-based clocks would appear to lose 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day as a result of these factors."
Simple fix. Make the whole moon GMT. Reset the clock every day at 00:00 to account for slippage. For time keeping on the moon just have a moon time off some atomic clock.
Having just gone through the daylight savings change here in Europe, I found this really fascinating: how __do__ you set up time for the moon where time, at least as we understand it, doesn't really exist?
I'm sure that, starting from scratch on Earth, we'd probably come up with a system of time zones that is broadly similar to what we have today but with some new zones and some adapted zones. Then again, maybe we'd find a way to change things up altogether - is there any value to GMT being based on Greenwich if the UK is not the global power it once was?
GMT is a time zone used in Britain. It is no more special than any other. The standard is UTC.
If engineers were in charge, there would be no time zones. Brits would get up at 08:00, Indians at 04:00, and Americans at 12:00/13:00/14:00 depending on location. Shops would set their opening hours relative to local sunrise. It's already the case that work-shifts span calendar days for many people, and that franchise locations have differing hours of business, and that fuckwits telephone you when you're trying to sleep.
People's eyes glaze over when I rant about this. But yes, I fantasize about a world where you could say "let's set up a video call at 6" and there's no mental math when there's geographic distance involved.
Biggest downside I can think of, apart from the entire population groaning about making the switch, would be the confusion from reading literature from the before times. Oh, and all blood, sweat, and tears of all the devs who created timezone code going down the drain.
Some industries do this using UTC. For example flight departure and arrival times are in UTC on all paperwork. And also the meteo reports and forecasts, and airspace restrictions, and airport opening times etc.
Mostly out of a necessity that fights tend to cross timezones and planes come and go from all over the world and they don't want to have to figure out everywhere what the local time is.
Really only passenger info screens convert to local time.
The biggest downside would be the date rolling over during a record-keeping period. But this is already a problem and people handle it just fine. I mean, we say "tonight" for 02:30 on the following day, so meh.
> But this is already a problem and people handle it just fine. I mean, we say "tonight" for 02:30 on the following day, so meh.
Because that only affects the comparatively small number of people awake respectively events happening at that time of day. If you move the calendar date change right into the middle of the waking hours of almost everybody else, things get quite a bit more annoying.
I am extremely glad engineers are not in charge. Only an engineer (with a teeny-tiny dash of mid to high levels of egoism because of presumably how smart he thinks he is; the keyword being "thinks") thinks of humans as nothing else except extremely mechanical machines
> If engineers were in charge, there would be no time zones
We might not specifically have time zones, but we'd have something that is equivalent.
We live on an approximately spherical world, its rotation is not tidal locked to its star, its rotational axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, we evolved to synchronize our biological rhythms including our sleep/wake cycle to local sunrise and sunset, we occupy a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, and we need to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us.
That puts a lower limit on the complexity of our time keeping system.
> It's already the case that work-shifts span calendar days for many people
They're still only a small minority a people, though. (In Germany for example ~5 % of people regularly work night shifts.)
Without timezones, in locations further away from the meridian a far larger number of people will suddenly be impacted. Having the calendar day change smack in the middle of waking hours of most people is rather annoying.
They don't need any meridians. The entire place will be one zone. The time will be the same everywhere.
The problem is that the time there will move very slightly differently than here on earth, because of the lower gravity, to the tune of 60 ms per day. That's almost a second every two weeks.
So the question isn't "what time do we set the clocks to?" but "what time will it be an hour from now?" Have a leap-second every few weeks?
"U.S. leadership in defining a suitable standard - one that achieves the accuracy and resilience required for operating in the challenging lunar environment - will benefit all spacefaring nations," - some American who believes the US should be the authority for this, shockingly.
Why would anyone bother following the US standard for lunar time? They can't even work out the metric system.
Ah yes. It appears that the French have already seized control of the appellation process. Except that French media are reporting it as "le temps lunaire coordonné" (TLC?). So the White House seems to be (somewhat blindly?) reproducing the oddity of how "UTC" (with the letters in that order) isn't quite "Universal Coordinated Time".
I just know this is going to take weeks or months of planning meetings, stakeholder sensing sessions, and arguments over minutiae. Not a good use of official time and taxpayer resources.
It's all arbitrary anyway. Just pick something that makes sense. UTC, UTC+1 (ESA), UTC-6 (Houston), whatever.
It's not about a "timezone", the article is about high precision time keeping and how to set a standard for it on the moon.
Because (according to the article) an earth clock when moved to the moon wold be a few micro seconds per day slower then it was on earth, causing drift.
So just setting UTC or UTC+1 isn't the ting they're trying to decide. It's more about a scientific method to derive highly accurate time on the moon, which can't just be earth type atomic clocks because they would drift.
Wouldn't the solution be to use microseconds? Maybe I'm just being naive, I love science, but as I get older it gets hard to keep all the whims of tech in my head.
The consensus is that gravitational time
dilation occurs has a constant effect, not that it's qualitatively different in some complicated way that requires a Presidential directive to figure out.
Do you have any evidence that they're more "different" than Earth "local microseconds" versus moon "local microseconds"?
