[tz] Time for a Lunar time zone? -Brooks

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Thu Jul 11 10:07:17 UTC 2024


On 7/11/24 03:44, Brooks Harris wrote:
> On 2023-03-02 04:47 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> Presumably ESA's boffins are on top of this.....
>>
> Researchers more precisely calculate how much faster time passes on the 
> moon
> https://phys.org/news/2024-07-precisely-faster-moon.html

That news article says "the team found that time on the moon ticks by at 
0.0000575 seconds faster per day (57.50 µs/d) than it does on Earth."

But the paper <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.16147> says this figure needs 
to be adjusted for the total orbital energies for the Earth and Moon, 
and later gives an adjusted figure of "56.02 μs/d, with the clock on the 
Moon’s surface running faster by that amount compared to a terrestrial 
clock. Additionally, there are periodic terms, the largest of which is 
due to the lunar orbit around the Earth that amounts to about 30.95 μs/d 
...".

Clearly precise lunar timekeeping will not be a trivial matter.

It's still not clear to me what the relationship between the ESA and 
NASA is on this. Will there be a single standard for lunar timekeeping, 
or multiple standards? Will this be like the squabbles over the Prime 
Median in the 19th century?



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