NASA to Develop Lunar Time Standard for Exploration Initiatives.
The Moon is pictured on Dec. 7, 2022, the day before its Full Moon phase from the International Space Station as it orbited above the southern Indian Ocean. Credit: NASA NASA will coordinate with U.S. government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) following a policy directive from the White House in April. The agency’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program is leading efforts on creating a coordinated time, which will enable a future lunar ecosystem that could be scalable to other locations in our solar system . The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon , similar to how scientists calculate Earth’s globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon’s surface will appear to ‘tick’ faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one m...