Future space missions will need their own time system to take one problem out of the equation.
Our natural satellite appears to be the nextand expected, human stop in his goal of exploring what lies beyond planet Earth. The next Artemis missions Their ultimate goal is for a woman and a person of color to walk on the lunar surface, but this will only be the beginning of an even bigger challenge: colonize the Moon and discover all its secrets. We know how to calculate the distance that exists to the Moon and who claims to be the owner of our satellite, yes, it seems that the over time up there is going to be something hard to establish.
The problem of creating ‘lunar time’
Recently, the ESA has published a statement in which it tries to make us understand the concept of time on the Moon. Since the Moon will be the target of dozens of missions in the coming decades, the major space organizations They have put on going what has been called as LunarNet. This concept would encompass ‘a set of standards, protocols and interface requirements that would allow future lunar missions work togethersimilar to what happens on Earth with GPS technology’.
Telling time on the Moonhttps://t.co/xJiCM3jNve
A new era of lunar exploration is on the rise, with dozens of Moon missions planned for the coming decade but one thing that is not yet clear is when and how the moon’s time will be set.#ArianaNews #Moon #Time pic.twitter.com/QBSuBSHZU6
—Ariana News (@ArianaNews_) March 1, 2023
And this is where the moon timejust like explains Pietro GiordanoESA Navigation Systems Engineer:
During the meeting at ESTEC, we understood the importance and urgency of defining a reference lunar time, which is internationally accepted and to which lunar systems and users can refer. A collective international effort is being launched to achieve this.
Here on Earth, the gps system has made it possible to find a temporal and spatial frame of reference with which, for example, mobile phones can determine their global position. This, broadly speaking, is what you would like to do with the establishment of the frame of reference that we told you about previously. And it is also where the first problemsamong which are the determination of whether an organization should be responsible for the maintenance of lunar time and that the watches don’t work the same way on the Moon than on Earth, they actually go faster on our satellite. The challenges, as we approach the return to the Moon, are more and more complicated.