Why space experts want a new time zone for the Moon

With dozens of lunar missions due to launch over the next decade, the European Space Agency (ESA) wants to give the Moon its own time zone.

The ESA is collaborating with other space agencies including Nasa in a “joint international effort” to determine what a lunar time zone might look like, said Axios.

The ESA announced the effort to standardise Moon time earlier this week, but space organisations first opened their discussions on the question at the ESA’s Netherlands-based Estec technology centre in November last year, according to Sky News.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Until now, each lunar mission has used its own system for time-keeping, the ESA said on Monday. But “as dozens of missions will be operating on and around the Moon and needing to communicate together and fix their positions independently from Earth, this new era will require its own time,” the agency said.

Working out a system of time for the Moon could prove challenging, seeing as “clocks on the moon run 56 microseconds per day faster than Earth”, reported Axios.

Getting it right is critical, however, because having a standard lunar time will not only make it easier for space agencies to communicate with one another but would also help astronauts navigate, said Smithsonian magazine.

According to Nature’s Elizabeth Gibney, space agencies are planning to install a global satellite navigation system (GNSS) on the Moon starting around 2030, which would operate similarly to how GPS works on Earth.

If scientists are able to establish “a working time system for the moon, we can go on to do the same for other planetary destinations”, said Bernhard Hufenbach, part of ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration.