Does the moon need its own time zone? We may need to decide soon

[Admin]

What time is it on the moon? The dawn of a new era of space exploration means space agencies may need to decide on a common "lunar time."

Does the moon need its own time zone? We may need to decide soon : Read more

 

[XAirForce]

Can we use UTC taking into account the distance from Sun and pulsars to regulate the second hand 🖐 @nasa @nist. We can call it Stardate : )

Signed: Startfleet Adm. Abe One K’Nowledge -Jedi

 

[Pogo]

Agree. Why not use UTC? It is used here everywhere down here where where multiple time zones are involved by everyone where it makes a difference, including on the ISS. This should be a no brained.

That being said, they could develop some sort of local time to relate the Sun position and so forth, but, in communication with Earth, and coordinating with various missions, UTC is the obvious choice, IMHO.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I am not seeing a problem that we have not already encountered and solved in similar circumstances.

We already deal with different clock speeds between Earth, low Earth orbit, Mars landers, and even the various probes we have sent to the gas giant planetes and beyond, even out of the solar system into interstellar space.

We already have bases in Antarctica that have periods of light and dark that are far different than the circadian rhythm that human bodies are tuned to.

We already have astronauts working in low Earth orbit for up to a year at a time, seeing the Earth below going from light to dark and back again roughly every 90 minutes, while they are in light a bit more than darkness.

All of this is done with standardization "Universal Time", and we are pretty darn good at it, by now.

So, while the Moon probably needs some sort of system for relating its various cyclic phenomena phases to Universal Time, I don't see any value to having all of that somehow predicated on something like just one of those cycles, such as when the Sun angle at a certain location is some number or the Moon's location crosses the Earth's meridian for Paris. Yes, those numbers may have some importance for some functions, but having the astronauts wearing Rolexes that run on "Moon time" seems ridiculous.

 

[billslugg]

The French wanted TUC (Time Universal Coordinated). the English wanted UCT (Universal Coordinated Time) so we settled on UTC. Perhaps we can reach a similarly dysfunctional compromise on the Moon. I'm for MUT (Moon Universal Time) or TUM (Time Universal Moon). Toss in Mars and we get MUMU (Moon Universal Mars Universal).

 

[Unclear Engineer]

There is always "ZULU".