Activity on and around the Moon is expected to intensify in the coming years, leading Washington to call for the establishment of 'Coordinated Lunar Time.'
and its international partners have big plans when it comes to the Moon—plans that will require the careful synching of Earth-based clocks with those on the Moon. The White House wants
to develop a solution to support the Artemis program, but to also maintain the United States’ leading position in the global space race. The plan, first reported by Reuters, is for the U.S. space agency to develop Coordinated Lunar Time by the end of 2026. Coordinating time systems on Earth is a relatively easy task, but due to relativity, it’s considerably more challenging once the Moon becomes involved. Due to Einsteinian relativity, time passes differently on the Moon than it does on Earth.
launched its Deep Space Atomic Clock in 2019, to allow spacecraft to better navigate independent from communiques from Earth. Missions to the Moon currently communicate with team members on Earth using coordinated universal time as a common temporal language. UTC’s timing is tied to an ensemble of atomic clocks. In fact, UTC is only one coordinated universal time scale; you can read about different types of universal time here.
astronauts return to the lunar surface. Artemis 3 seeks to land a human crew in the vicinity of the lunar south pole no earlier than 2026. The return-to-space-race, if you will, is made up of many sprints, across several fields of engineering and space science. One of the sprints is the race to define time itself, and the White House just told its athlete to start running. As to how Russia, China, or other nations will respond to this seemingly unilateral action, that remains an open question.
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