NASA To Create Time Standard For the Moon (reuters.com) 75
artmancc writes: The White House has directed NASA and other federal agencies to get to work on a plan to implement precision timekeeping and dissemination on the moon and elsewhere in space. Reuters cited a memo from the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that "instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC). The name of the proposed time standard is similar to the terrestrial time standard known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
"OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar's memo said that for a person on the moon, an Earth-based clock would appear to lose on average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day and come with other periodic variations that would further drift moon time from Earth time," Reuters reported. An unidentified OSTP official said the lunar time standard is needed for secure and synchronized communication between astronauts, satellites orbiting the moon, and Earth.
"OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar's memo said that for a person on the moon, an Earth-based clock would appear to lose on average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day and come with other periodic variations that would further drift moon time from Earth time," Reuters reported. An unidentified OSTP official said the lunar time standard is needed for secure and synchronized communication between astronauts, satellites orbiting the moon, and Earth.
Will there be arguments over (Score:5, Funny)
Moonlight Savings Time?
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Make like Neil Armstrong and Spring Forward!
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Neil Armstrong? What has he got to do with it? Just phone one of the following numbers and listen to Fred Covington instead!:
The U.S. Naval Observatory provides public time service via 26 NTP[32] servers on the public Internet,[35] and via telephone voice announcements:[36]
+1 202 762-1401 (Washington, DC)
+1 202 762-1069 (Washington, DC)
+1 719 567-6742 (Colorado Springs, CO)
The voice of actor Fred Covington (1928–199
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You mean leap forward. We can do it every 20-30 years so there's enough error accumulated to make it a giant leap forward.
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I don't think I've ever seen Neil Armstrong confused with Chairman Mao before...
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Uh...?
https://library.nashville.org/... [nashville.org].
"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." (Neil Armstrong) For many of us, the statement made by Neil Armstrong as he stepped onto the moon July 20, 1969 is simply a mention in the history books, but to those of us who were children and young people glued to the TV set that day, it was an awesome wonder.
Where does Mao come into this? I am truly baffled by your comment.
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probably referring to a different leap [wikipedia.org]
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Oh, I see, thanks.
Other person confused giant leap with great leap.
I guess history is just chock full of all sorts of leaping and jumping and hopping around.
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How about a Quantum Leap [imdb.com]?
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"Leap forward" seems to me like it should be a year, not an hour.
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I'm sure some IEEE sub-committee will sort it out over the next few hundred years.
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Curious to know: do whalers [youtube.com] keep daylight savings time?
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Well, it was thought of at least as early as 1931, though in a different context:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That foxy Guy Lombardo beat me to it.
And thanks to YT's CC algorithms, we get to remember that famous line from the song about needing MST "to keep each Baltar's laid in rice until doggy you"
Well, who can argue with that logic?
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The rotation pole of the Moon is only oriented at 1.54deg to the ecliptic, so the seasonal variation of day length is far lower than it is for Earth - it's actually lower than the variation for Mars! So there would be no call for a Lunar DST.
Oh, sorry, were you making a joke? Out of people who can't handle changing time zones on a regular, predictable basis. They should try changing time zones - several at a go! - on an irregular and unpredictable basis.
Lunar Lunacy. (Score:4, Funny)
A new lunar time zone is fine, but I swear the first asshole who starts talking about Daylight Savings time changes is gonna get their ass beat.
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So you agree that there are not much savings ?
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What about the first asshole to pedantically point out that there is no "s" on the end of "Saving" in Daylight Saving Time?
Daylight saving time (DST), also referred to as daylight saving(s), daylight savings time, daylight time (United States and Canada), or summer time
I might let that one slide, given how picky society is about that one.
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A new lunar time zone is fine, but I swear the first asshole who starts talking about Daylight Savings time changes is gonna get their ass beat.
Funny thing about this - we tried doing away with it before. In 1973 they voted to do away with it and we tried it in 1974. Everyone hated it. I remember that experiment.
https://www.washingtonian.com/... [washingtonian.com]
Year after year we continue to hear from people about it. OMG, I have to do something. This is terrible. Then we move it back, same thing again. OMG, I have to do something again.
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The Germans have had a moon base on the other side since the end of ww2.
Nomenclature (Score:5, Funny)
I assume this new unit of time will be called the Luna-tick.
Re:Nomenclature (Score:4, Funny)
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Leap years will be longer (Score:5, Funny)
Less gravity
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How about involving the international community? (Score:2)
'cause the moon and space doesn't belong to US and as Yanks can't even write a date in the correct order I wouldn't trust some underfunded agency that has lost its lustre of late to come up with something viable and devoid of parochial bullshit.
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How has NASA lost its luster of late?
And please don't be a moonbat or flat earther.
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Um, that's a lot of shade you got there. IIRC they devised watches running on Mars time for Mars rover project, and I see the ESA also made a Mars watch with Omega. Coordinating with the community (at least EU and Japan, and other countries that have actually made it to or near the Moon) makes a lot of sense obviously. But given they have spent more time driving around on other bodies than Earth they ought to be able to make a pretty good proposal.
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'cause the moon and space doesn't belong to US and as Yanks can't even write a date in the correct order I wouldn't trust some underfunded agency that has lost its lustre of late to come up with something viable and devoid of parochial bullshit.
Moony McMoonface will be the official time clock on the moon? Gee, wonder how that happened.
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For the uneducated..
To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.
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Mmmmm.... pie!
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The most correct date function is yyyymmdd:hh:mm:ss
Anything else is stupid, just like DST.
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yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ
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Getting this into the skulls of American journalists may be a messy operation. Perhaps if we write it in the biggest letters we can, on the smallest bullets that could penetrate their parochial armour ... ?
WRITE a date in one of the many correct orders? Hell, they can't even READ one. E
Finally!!!! (Score:2)
Let's make moon time METRIC.
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If the numbers in use (say, "d.hours" of 100 divisions called "d.minutes" ; 10 "d.hours" per approximate human duty/ off-duty cycle, so 20 "d.hours" per "day") are very different to those on the terrestrial clock, people might be less tempted to try to align the clocks. It's not as if there is any reason to do so - Lunar Base would be talking to 2 or 3 terrestrial communications centres at more-or-less evenly spaced terrestrial longitudes, so your Lunar worker would be talking
Synchronized clocks (Score:2)
The problem is synchronizing clocks on the moon with Earth: The method will have to allow for the changing distance to Earth. Also, the moon doesn't have any wi-fi towers, so they will have to be built to provide time-synchronization (NTP) and communication services.
Building a communications network will require everyone using the same technology: We already do it on Earth but that may not be enough when fighting over land on the moon.
It sounds like they want a clock which measures the lunar day/year (wh
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It sounds like they want a clock which measures the lunar day/year (which are the same since the moon orbits the Earth at the same ratio as it rotates) but that is worthless. Humans need to divide their sleeping and eating and alertness activities into intervals of 18-26 hours.
The AI overlords will mark your comment for documenting human behavior. They consider it “humor” when the humans assume they are still a relevant calculation in a a future world devoid of workers that need eating and alertness levels.
(And I’m certain people laughed off Orwells 1984 when it was released in the exact same way. And yet look where we are today.)
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If you want to do that, that might indeed be a problem. Why would you want to do that? 24 hour operations centres (we call them "war rooms" at work, but meh on that detail) in existing terrestrial operations already have staff operating on (typically) 3*8 hour shifts, with personnel changing shift cycle every few weeks. Sometimes. Other people just end up on permanent night shift. Suits some people ; kills others. (Killing your staff worsens turno
Uh, what? (Score:2)
While there are relativistic (and other) effects which would cause physical clocks to differ, the second is defined in terms which exclude those ("unperturbed"). So there is no validity to the claim - the second is deliberately defined to be invariant (to th
Re:Uh, what? (Score:4, Interesting)
So there is no validity to the claim - the second is deliberately defined to be invariant (to the best of our knowledge)
I'm going with the scientists on this one versus a /.'er who says there's no validity. Looking it up by the fancy name [wikipedia.org], Wikipedia has citations saying it was discussed back in 1695 by Edmond Halley long before relativity [wikipedia.org], confirmed in the 1700s, and accurately estimated by the 1800s, was re-evaluated in the 20th century, and has been precisely measured and verified with the Apollo retroreflectors.
While the White House directive is new, figuring out timing on the moon goes to the 1960s, and modern efforts include a GPS-type effort on the moon [unoosa.org] that discusses issues from that same 58.7 microsecond/day decay.
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Re: Uh, what? (Score:2)
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In a flat space time, yes, the second is invariant. Over the scale of a laboratory, built on level ground over reasonably uniform geology, that's a close-enough approximation (though off-the-shelf gravity meters these days need levelling to better than a millimetre over chassis dimensions of tens of centimetres).
Unfortunately, over the distance from
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the second is defined in terms which exclude those ("unperturbed"). So there is no validity to the claim - the second is deliberately defined to be invariant (to the best of our knowledge), and physical clocks are corrected for such errors.
This is completely wrong. There are quite a few different time standards developed to deal with the fact that the length of a second is different in different places. UTC is based on Atomic Time, specifically defines what a second is near the surface of the Earth. An SI second is defined as a certain number of vibrations of a caesium atom, which will be observed differently by observers in different reference frames.
There are numerous time standards defined to deal with this. E.g.. Geocentric Coordinate
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
Time Deltas: it's impossible to know and a sin to ask!
Just use UTC (even if you rename or copy it) (Score:3)
Astronomers want to know when local solar midnight is, so they know where to point their telescopes. They'd want something based on the lunar day (about 28 earth days long), even if it doesn't line up with earth time.
Everybody else wants to keep a 24-hour day (the lunar day is too long to use on its own and there's no real reason to know when local noon is, it also doesn't divide into an even number of 24-hour chunks). They want to know when to call their relatives on Earth for an after-dinner chat without doing non-integer math.
Mars would require a different solution. 'Sleep while dark / be awake while light' beats having time synchronized with your relatives, or with the work schedules at mission control.
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Also, seismologists want to be able to agree on the time at widely-spaced seismographs, so they can calculate the underground location, fracture plane orientation, energy release and ground-movement for an earthquake, partly to predict likely tsunamis, but also to predict where the Earth's poles have shifted to, how individual plates have re-oriented compared to the previous location of the poles, and how muc
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Physicists want a second to be a second, and larger units to be a fixed multiple of the smaller unit (no leap seconds, etc).
The "size" of a second depends entirely on the acceleration experienced in your frame of reference. Your experience of a second appears to always be the same (while the perception of a second varies on your mental state).
Why? (Score:2)
Just use UTC - there is no reason for anything else. Yes, there is a relativistic time difference, but this is something on the order of 1/50 of a second per year. Surely than can be handled via a periodic correctlon? "Smear" it away once a year, problem solved.
In theory, NASA could propose something like this. However, they won't, because the White House specifically demands a separate standard with a separate name. Some clueless high muckmucks want a trophy to put on their Wikipedia pages.
Suggestion (Score:2)
"What was urged was to make a lunar exactly equal to twenty-eight days (instead of 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.78 seconds) and do this by making days longer—and hours, minutes, and seconds, thus making each semi-lunar exactly two weeks."
Heinlein, Robert A.. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (p. 202).
lunar ticks (Score:2)
So they are saying that if they use a clock on the moon their local time will drift w.r.t a clock on earth. Isn't that even more of a justification for using a clock on earth as the reference for everything ?
It's not as if you can't build a special clock that can factor in the timing differences and get a radio signal from earth to keep it in trim.
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If you engineered two events, on on Earth and on on the Moons surface, so that viewed from one direction they appeared to be simultaneous, they would not appear simultaneous from almost all other directions. In a very real sense, the appearance of simultaneity that you have engineered is no more real than any other optical illusion.
That's relativity. It's real. Your
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You're right, I probably don't properly understand the problem they are trying to solve
But with so many possible observers it wont be possible to satisfy everyone about simultaneity of widely separated events. However scientists have known about relativity for a century and they can factor it in to surmise what another observer experiences. If they are going to do that then why not base everything off of the calculated experience of an observer that uses UTC at some point on Earth (maybe Kazakhstan)
Relativ
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Tom Lehrer - That's Mathematics! (Score:2)
Chicago Transit Authority (Score:2)
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
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No, we really don't know what time it is. There is no "time" without also specifying a location (and, I think, a state of motion).
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Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
Sure. However, it's relative to you.
Couldn't resist. Obvious joke.
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If so, I can't imagine why
We've all got time enough to cry
Unacceptable! (Score:2)
"OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar's memo said that for a person on the moon, an Earth-based clock would appear to lose on average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day and come with other periodic variations that would further drift moon time from Earth time,"
That is absolutely unacceptable. I propose we detonate a series of nuclear charges on the moon, in series, with the blasts channeled to an angle of 41.3 degrees precisely. We'll speed the moon back up and eliminate those losses. What could possibly go wrong?
Time to rename UTC (Score:2)
Remember UUID? Lore has it that Microsoft used the term GUID because they felt that "universally unique" was presumptuous, so they went with "globally unique" instead.
Clearly, UTC overstepped its universality. If the moon will get its own time zone, perhaps UTC should be renamed GTC.