Time on the moon is what America says it is

if NASA's Artemis program If the mission goes off without a hitch, there will be astronauts living at an outpost near the Moon's south pole by 2028. The effort to efficiently plan operations to maintain this lunar base while exploring the lunar surface will be enormous. The White House issued a memo On Tuesday he announced the goal of creating and implementing a unified time standard and lunar time zone, Lunar Coordinated Time (LTC), before 2027. Deep down, every American already knows what the answer should be.

Time at the base of calm, Apollo 11 landing siteMust be LTC based. Yes, the Artemis program will be a collaborative effort between 35 different countries, but only one country has ever successfully landed people on the moon before. This is not the first time a single country has used its prominent position to dictate a global standard.

There will be a legitimate need for a celestial time standard as humanity expands into space to coordinate them NASAAnd other space agencies and private companies. The White House cited the need for accuracy “to support accurate navigation and science” and flexibility in the case of communications Cut off with the ground. However, the differences between this planet and the moon are measured in microseconds. The memorandum states the following:

“For example, to an observer on the Moon, an Earth clock would appear to lose an average of 58.7 microseconds per Earth day with additional periodic changes. This holds important implications for developing standards and capabilities for work on or around the Moon.”

LTC will also be linked in some way to Earth's specific time standard, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC.) Every time zone around the world is expressed as UTC plus or minus a number of hours. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) itself is actually the time at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London. Britain's position k A global superpower In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it allowed its standards to become global standards.

American exceptionalism aside, Apollo 11 is the starting point for humanity's presence on the moon. Placing an LTC at the mission's landing site will commemorate the efforts to reach the lunar surface Humanity returns forever. NASA may be America's space agency, but the organization has always had altruistic ambitions. The plaque the Apollo 11 crew left behind says: “We come in peace for all mankind.”