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| Image: NASA |
A statement from the European Space Agency (ESA), on February 27, broke the news. With many lunar missions planned for the next decade, space organizations have begun to discuss creating their own lunar time zone, in order to facilitate communications and navigation services on the satellite.
At a more recent meeting of the ESA European Space Technology and Research Center (ESTEC), held in the Netherlands in November 2022, the idea of a lunar timeline was discussed again.
“During this meeting at ESTEC, we agreed on the importance and urgency of defining a common lunar reference time, which is internationally accepted and to which all lunar systems and users can refer,” Pietro Giordano, Navigation System Engineer at ESA, points out in the official released statement.
The lunar area is supposed to be part of a larger satellite architecture deal called “Luna Net.” According to Javier Ventura-Traveset, Director of Navigation at the European Space Agency, the initiative is “a framework of mutually agreed standards, protocols and interface requirements, allowing future lunar missions to work together, similar to what we did on Earth with the joint use of the Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS). And Galileo”.
The Gateway lunar station is expected in the future to be open to astronaut residences, and to be resupplied by launches from NASA’s Artemis program. At the same time, many unmanned missions will also be carried out. With the lunar region, missions will be able to interact like never before, conducting joint observations and satellite rendezvous.
time zone challenges
Clocks on the satellite run faster than their terrestrial counterparts — gaining about 56 millionths of a second per day. In this way, the international team operating in the lunar region would encounter technical problems, such as, for example, aligning lunar times with Earth times.
“Of course, the agreed time system must be practical for the astronauts,” explains Bernhard Hoffenbach, a member of the Moonlight Management team. “This would be quite a challenge on a surface where each equatorial day lasts 29.5 days, including 15 days of icy lunar nights, where the entire Earth is just a little blue circle in the dark sky.”
