The Moon complicates things, partly because it’s so far away - but also because time literally works differently there. And that works pretty well aboard the ISS, which orbits 250 miles above Earth’s surface. Crews on the International Space Station run on UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, also called Greenwich Mean Time. What Times Is It in Space? Who Knows!Īt the moment, most space missions operate based on the time zone of their home country, or they use something called “mission elapsed time,” which is a 24-hour schedule based on when the spacecraft launched. But in some ways, it’s really just a logical extension of the invention of time zones back in 1883 - nothing new under the Sun (or on the Moon). That’s why NASA, the European Space Agency, and other organizations from around the world are now actively working on establishing an official time zone for the Moon. Thanks to space travel, we now have to reckon with timekeeping on other worlds whose rotation doesn’t match Earth’s. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the agency that’s now responsible for managing Daylight Savings Time.ġ40 years later, here we are again: a new way of traveling is forcing humanity to figure out how to standardize timekeeping. The major railroad companies as a result began to operate on a coordinated system of four time zones starting in 1883,” writes the U.S. “Due to this lack of time standardization, schedules on the same tracks often could not be coordinated, resulting in collisions. But once trains started zipping people from place to place in a matter of hours, things got more confusing. When it took days on horseback to get from one place to the next, that didn’t cause much of a problem. Those time zones were developed in 1883 in response to a new type of travel: trains.īefore 1883, most cities and towns ran on their own local time, which could vary by a few minutes from one city to the next. We have 24 time zones here on Earth, dividing our planet into roughly 15-degree slices, which line up (again, very roughly) with how far our planet rotates in an hour. Here’s a look at how Lunar Standard Time might work and why it matters what time it is on the Moon. Daylight Savings Time is upon us, but at least we’re not dealing with it on the Moon.Īgencies announced last week that they were working on giving the Moon its own time zone, and have been since November 2022, but that’s going to mean reckoning with politics, technology, and the physics of time itself.
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