Developers around the world UNITE! no new moon-time!
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Ah yes, 168 football fields. What a useful method of measurement.
That’s precision 😎
Approximately 168 football fields. Approximately precise.
Especially as one can rarely find American "football" fields in the civilized world. Funny that a site with "science" in its name is incapable of using normal (scientific!) metric units.
We're adding earth problems to the moon now? No time zones anywhere
Time zones are useful. All the odd cases and exceptions are the problem here.
We need to abolish time
Why don't they simply run the Moon on Earth time, e.g. UTC? The derivation between Earth and Moon timepieces is known and can easily brought in as a correcting factor.
Then a second on the moon is not the same length as a second on earth, and that can also cause problems.
It is all a question of definition. The second is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" - obviously with Earth conditions in mind.
So if Moon time is 56 microseconds ahead of Earth time per day, why not just adding 514,787.37912 transitions periods per day in Moons atomic clocks, and everything is fine?
Because then seconds are longer on the moon, so if you tell your spaceship “burn fuel for 16.52891 seconds” it may burn fuel for slightly too long or too short if two people on the team used different definitions of seconds. We’ve already had historical spacecraft malfunctions due to confusion about units.
Communication requirements rely on time being in sync, but engineering requirements rely on time having a time having a fixed length definition.
The real solution is probably something like a time zone that relative to earth time progresses faster but periodically adds leap seconds, or something along those lines.
This isn’t that outrageous of a solution when you learn that we are frequently adding leap seconds to our earth clocks already.
The article author is either confused or over-simplifying. We don’t need a “time zone” for the moon an earth time zone would almost certainly be used by anyone on the moon.
What we need is a standard way for how we keep time on the moon. Mainly so that we can establish the lunar equivalent of GPS.