Exklusiv: Das Weiße Haus weist die NASA an, einen Zeitstandard für den Mond zu schaffen
https://www.reuters.com/science/white-house-directs-nasa-create-time-standard-moon-2024-04-02/?utm_source=reddit.com
Exklusiv: Das Weiße Haus weist die NASA an, einen Zeitstandard für den Mond zu schaffen
https://www.reuters.com/science/white-house-directs-nasa-create-time-standard-moon-2024-04-02/?utm_source=reddit.com
2 Kommentare
From the article
>The White House on Tuesday directed NASA to establish a unified standard of time for the moon and other celestial bodies, as the United States aims to set international norms in space amid a growing lunar race among nations and private companies.
>
>The head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), according to a memo seen by Reuters, 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).
Also from the article
>Under its Artemis program, NASA is aiming to send astronaut missions to the moon in the coming years and establish a scientific lunar base that could help set the stage for future missions to Mars. Dozens of companies, spacecraft and countries are involved in the effort.
>
>An OSTP official said that without a unified lunar time standard it would be challenging to ensure that data transfers between spacecraft are secure and that communications between Earth, lunar satellites, bases and astronauts are synchronized.
Some of the challenges of an interplanetary time standard (these are also touched on in the article):
1. Time is not standard. A clock in orbit ticks slower than a clock on the surface of the Earth. Thus every time standard is going to need to either have mechanisms for translation to other frames of reference or mechanisms to synchronise local „seconds since mission start“ with Earth seconds.
2. There are many different ideas of how to manage time, using Mars as an example (three examples of time, not an exhaustive list):
1. Slow down your clocks and use a 24 hour day with 60 minutes in an hour and 60 „Mars seconds“ in a minute (this is what NASA did for their early Mars exploration program, with specially commissioned wrist watches)
2. Keep the same measure for a second, measure each day as 24.6 hours
3. Keep the same measure for a second, measure each day as 24 official hours with 37 minutes of time that is literally „off the clock“
3. How you track time will change depending on what your purpose is in tracking time. Are you recording activity, are you attempting to perform more precise navigation for spacecraft in your local space traffic region, or are you attempting to schedule things to happen simultaneously in multiple locations that for some reason need to be exactly coordinated? This is somewhat related to point 1, but also related to whether it’s important to track the passage of time in one place, or if the focus is keeping a clock in sync with another clock on (or in orbit around) a different planet
On Earth we have a nifty timekeeping standard in GPS which means that everyone has access to a clock that is almost as accurate as the most accurate clock on the planet (your clock will drift between corrections). As per the article one option for accurate timekeeping on the Moon is to establish a master clock on the Moon that will be the time standard for lunar exploration. NASA has the [Deep Space Atomic Clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Atomic_Clock) project already working towards this or a similar goal (stable, accurate, predictable time standard for deep space probes to improve remote sensing capability).