White House tasks NASA to create a clock standard for time on the Moon
In a policy announcement yesterday, the White House has directed NASA to establish a coordinated lunar time standard (dubbed LTC) for time on the Moon, similar to Univeral or Greenwich time (UTC) now used on Earth.
A unified time standard—Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)—will act as the established standard to enable cislunar operations and can be tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time on Earth. This policy directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to deliver a strategy for the implementation of LTC no later than December 31, 2026. NASA will also coordinate with other federal agencies as appropriate and international partners through existing international forums, including Artemis Accords partner nations.
As noted in the full policy statement [pdf]:
Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity. For example, to an observer on the Moon, an Earth-based clock will appear to lose on
average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day with additional periodic variations.
While this difference would be utterly unnoticed by people, the difference will become a problem for GPS systems and other very sensitive systems that depend on precise timing. The new policy will attempt to prevent such issues by getting ahead of the problem. It will also work to coordinate this new lunar universal time with other nations doing lunar exploration.
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In a policy announcement yesterday, the White House has directed NASA to establish a coordinated lunar time standard (dubbed LTC) for time on the Moon, similar to Univeral or Greenwich time (UTC) now used on Earth.
A unified time standard—Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)—will act as the established standard to enable cislunar operations and can be tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time on Earth. This policy directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to deliver a strategy for the implementation of LTC no later than December 31, 2026. NASA will also coordinate with other federal agencies as appropriate and international partners through existing international forums, including Artemis Accords partner nations.
As noted in the full policy statement [pdf]:
Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity. For example, to an observer on the Moon, an Earth-based clock will appear to lose on
average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day with additional periodic variations.
While this difference would be utterly unnoticed by people, the difference will become a problem for GPS systems and other very sensitive systems that depend on precise timing. The new policy will attempt to prevent such issues by getting ahead of the problem. It will also work to coordinate this new lunar universal time with other nations doing lunar exploration.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Set the Moon to GMT. Done.
Well, as long as they don’t institute Daylight Savings Time up there . . .
You’ve really only got two options, right? You can either adjust the length of seconds on the moon, which will keep the time read in sync with Terran clocks (but screw up any measurements across time, like velocity or acceleration) or you can throw in a leap second every couplethree weeks to resync.
I suppose you could just not worry about syncing with Earth-time, but that seems unlikely given the effort made to keep clocks and calendars in sync with the motions of the Earth, some of which still apply to the moon.
With GPS all the physics details are hidden by the time you get to the end product; a time and position on earth. But with human observers in very different frames of reference for long times maybe there could be some confusion about observations unless everything is worked out and documented.
One GMT transmission a day is all that is needed to keep the clocks synced,
Waste of time. A distraction.
“similar to Univeral or Greenwich time (UTC)”
A bit trivial, but these are NOT the same. UTC is a time without any timezone information. All timezones are offsets from UTC. GMT is a timezone that is UTC with no offset. The distinction matters when computers are involved. GMT can be converted to another timezone, but UTC cannot.
UTC would of course be the base time count for everything. It already is.
But I was thinking more along the lines of a lunar day/night cycle vs an Earth day/night cycle.
If your lunar base made great use of windows you would thus go by a natural day/night cycle and that would be a little troubling.
Just stick to an Earth style day/night cycle and keep our biological clocks working correctly.
Lunar gravity time distortion is slightly different from no gravity with the larger difference from earths gravity.
Before digital, Earth time pieces have been set to the worldwide broadcast on short wave radio which counts down every minute of every day. I checked, it’s still there and can be synchronized to lunar time pieces. A low tech reliable solution that can be modernized to be laser precise.
yeah, waste of time, huge distraction.
58.7 microseconds difference per earth day adds up to about 2% of a second per year, meaning that in 50 years or so they’d have to leave out a second of LTC in order to stay synced with UTC (which time on earth already does every couple of years — or its opposite: introduce a leap-second — in order to stay synced with the solar and sidereal years).