What time is it on the moon? Europe pushes for the lunar time zone

Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP) — With more lunar missions on the horizon than ever before, the European Space Agency wants to give the moon its own time zone.

The agency said this week that space organizations around the world are studying how best to keep time on the moon. The idea came about during a meeting in the Netherlands late last year, where participants agreed on the urgent need to create a “common lunar reference time,” said Pietro Giordano, the space agency’s navigation system engineer.

“A joint international effort to achieve this is now being launched,” Giordano said in a statement.

Currently, the moon mission operates in the time of the country that operates the spacecraft. European space officials said the internationally accepted lunar time zone would make it easier for everyone, especially as more countries and even private companies target the moon and NASA prepares to send astronauts there.

NASA had to contend with the issue of time while designing and building the International Space Station, with the 25th anniversary of the launch of its first piece approaching.

While the space station doesn’t have its own time zone, it does operate in Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which is strictly based on atomic clocks. That helps split the time lag between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, and other partner space programs in Russia, Japan and Europe.

An international team that researches lunar time is debating whether a single organization should set and keep time on the moon, according to the European Space Agency.

There are also technical issues to consider. The space agency said clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day. Complicating matters, the beats occur differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.

Perhaps most importantly, lunar time should be practical for the astronauts out there, noted the space agency’s Bernhard Hoffenbach. NASA launches its first trip to the moon with astronauts in more than half a century in 2024, with a moon landing as early as 2025.

“This will be a huge challenge,” Hoffenbach said in a statement, as each day lasts 29.5 Earth days. “But now that we have established a working time system for the Moon, we can move forward to do the same for other planetary destinations.”

Mars standard time, anyone?

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