What Time Is It On The Moon? NASA Really Wants To Find Out.

As the modern-day space race continues to heat up, there are a bunch of details that experts are rushing to figure out. And near the top of the list, at least for the Biden administration and NASA, is establishing a standard lunar time zone.

Why it’s important

Our home planet is littered in time zones due to the Earth’s rotation on its axis, so we all have a pretty standard experience of morning, midday, and night. When it comes to other celestial bodies, however, we don’t really have a reliable way to tell time.

That hasn’t been a big deal in the past, but as a flurry of new moon missions are set to get underway in the near future, it’s an issue that needs to be addressed. And the White House wants to establish a lunar time zone by the end of 2026.

Although that might sound like a long time, this process is a lot more complicated than simply declaring it noon on the moon. As any scientist would tell you, time moves differently based on a number of external factors. And what we know about time on the moon reveals just how tricky it’s going to be to get it right.

Everything is relative

This massive project will involve sending a bunch of super-accurate clocks to the moon and gauging the results. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we already know quite a bit about it thanks to the work of Albert Einstein.

“Darn that Einstein guy,” said Planetary Society chief scientist Dr. Bruce Betts. “He came up with general relativity, and many strange things come out of it. One of them is that gravity slows time down.”

As a result, a day is roughly 56 microseconds shorter on the moon than on Earth.

Chris Agee May 31st, 2024

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