White House directs NASA to create time standard for the moon
White House directs NASA to create time standard for the moon
www.reuters.com
reuters.com
17 comments
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Makes you realize how UTC is not really universal but bound to the earth.
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Of course. But there is no reason Lunar time couldn’t be kept as UTC.
It all has to do with how we perceive time and humans are notoriously bad at it (most people seem to hate the idea that 12pm could mean middle of the night…they must have 12pm equal to sun high in the sky).
For the moon, though, the only issue would be with how UTC is calculated on the surface of Earth, which will have a time offset to play in with respect to the moon, in order to keep in sync with Earth-UTC (similar to how electronic satellites like GPS have to calculate).
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You could but you would need to redefine the second, no? I mean time runs slower on the Earth than the moon, so yes you could synchronise the moon to UTC but then one second of UTC goes by on the Earth but 1.0...01 second actually goes by on the Moon.
Unless you kept syncing up your clock, you'd soon find that Earth's 13:42 is actually your 13:43.
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At least we won't have any dang countries forcing time zones there to be in odd shapes.
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Just wait until every country’s base uses its own capital’s time. The time zones won’t even be in vague order around the moon like they generally are on earth but distributed randomly based on whatever country has the biggest base in the area.
Worse, if different countries bases and teams are using different home time zones than you don’t even have time zones. Two people from different countries in the same room could be different time zones, purely based on the country they work for.
If this fails and everyone with a space program can’t agree to just use the same standard, then time zones could get very, very bad in the future.
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stardates here we come!
17 comments
As a software developer, the last thing I want to see is another obscure timezone to deal with. It does seem like it'd be important to set a standard here though, and it's unlikely to affect most software engineers anyway unless we start seeing colonization at some point.
Also, in general, I can't imagine how relativity will work with this kind of timezone conversion.
Relativity is exactly the problem, time runs at a different speed on the moon. I have no idea how this is supposed to be handled in software.
Like if you have a lunar instant of time and an earth time and you want to figure out how much time happened between those two instants, I guess you'll essentially need to decide on a frame of reference and then take into account relativity as you convert the lunar time to UTC. But I'm not a physicist, I'm not sure if doing that even makes sense.
Time passes differently for other lower orbit satellites as well. They just adjust the time to take up the slack but it's likely done at very high precision.
Honestly, it should be really easy to figure out. Take two sycronized high precision clocks, put one in orbit and keep one on earth and then subtract one time from another after a few days. (At that precision, you also need to take into account the time it takes to radio the signal back to earth as well.)
Just use accelerometers to measure specific gravity and have time be a function of that measurement. Problem solved!
Oh god.
Can you confirm the lunar message was sent at the right time to have been the cause?
Do the logs on the lunar box come timestamped with a "helpful" string representation? If they're in unix epoc, is that time dilation adjusted?
How do satellites do it, I wonder?