Moon may soon have its own time zone, here’s why

Taking that into consideration, the European Union is pushing for the Moon to have its own time zone.

Hyderabad: With each passing year, more and more organisations – be they backed by countries or private space agencies, are coming up with space missions. And one of the most hyped and concentrated missions is the possibility of setting up colonies on the moon.

Taking that into consideration, the European Union is pushing for the Moon to have its own time zone. The conversation around this first began within space organisations at the ESA’s ESTEC technology center in the Netherlands in November 2022.

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This standardises lunar operations and overcomes a fundamental challenge of space exploration, they said, as the time differences add additional layers of complexity to lunar missions.

As a part of their rigorous campaign to have a lunar time zone, the European Space Agency (ESA) tweeted, “How do we tell the time on the Moon? A new era of space exploration needs a shared clock. We are working with NASA & other international partners towards a common timing system, allowing lunar missions to sync up, interoperate & self-navigate (sic).”

While it is known that the clocks on the Moon, and time itself, will run faster than on Earth, the definition of a second is the same everywhere. The ESA said that it is yet to be decided if a single organisation should be responsible for setting and maintaining lunar time and whether it should be on an independent basis or be kept synchronised with the Earth.