This is fine to do while we are still talking about space missions and quick landings, but the moment there is a base and people start to live there semi-permanently you won't be able to just pin it to UTC and call it a day.
Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.
> What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap and go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment and isn’t dependent on location.
What do you do about relativistic effects which cause time to move at different rates in different places, including on the Moon. From TFA:
> Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.
The really weird part to get your head around here is that in case of relativistic differences, it's actually time that's changing. So cesium still has the same frequency, the same number of events per second, but their second is not the same as ours.
When people talk about clocks running faster or slower, it muddies the topic a little because it makes it sound like a fault of the clock. The clock is accurately measuring the time it experiences.
My favourite trivia on this topic is that this is not hypothetical. If the clocks on GPS satellites kept earth time (eg, without accounting for relativistic drift), the entire GPS system would accumulate 10km of error per day. This is a genuine thing with measurable, real-world effects.
I think the point is that the clock on the moon runs faster from the point of view of an observer on Earth due to time dilation. I can't claim to understand it, but clocks "run slower" the deeper they are in a gravity well. To an observer colocated with the clock, it ticks accurately.
This isn't a new problem, though. GPS satellites have atomic clocks, and they drift 7uS or so per day due to time dilation.
Lunar gravity is about 1/6th of Earth gravity. Clocks slow down due to gravity (Einstein's relativity). Thus, clocks tick faster if there's less gravity.
Aside: we can measure this effect on Earth, between the foot and top of a mountain. Tom Scott has a video about exactly that.
Yes — relativistic effects are so fundamental that they affect every system/process (including atomic clocks ) and therefore any measurement scheme. That’s why we talk about “time slowing down”. The movie Interstellar has one popular depiction of this.
Because spacetime. Clocks run at different speeds depending on the gravitational field in which they operate. This is true for any two clocks, not just between earth and the moon. Satellites have to constantly correct their clocks for the same reason.
I think a more interesting argument is: Humans are 24-hour creatures (ok, maybe not precisely 24 hours, but close enough). That's how our internal clocks are wired. Its not nurture; its nature; and it would take generations living day-in day-out with a different cadence before we see biological adjustments.
Sure, our clocks are 24-hours-a-day because that syncs up well with the rotation of the earth. That's the scientists' argument, and it isn't why we use a 24 hour clock. The real reason is because it syncs up well with our biology. Its hard to imagine a world where these two things aren't synced up, but we're headed to some soon, and its likely that any clock which doesn't sync up to our biology (TimeAwake + TimeAsleep = 1 Day = 86400 seconds) will be rejected by anyone who isn't ordered by their commanding officer to use it.
Its like... just use UTC. Be done with it. The argument that "its an Earth Time, and we're Interplanetary now" feels like its coming from a sci-fi fan-fiction writer obsessed with The Expanse and solving problems before they exist. The most important priority for any timekeeping system is that its Useful. The second highest priority is that its Scientifically or Mathematically Beautiful, and this second priority is so far below the first one that we invented timezones and daylight savings time and everyone who has ever had to think critically about either of these things wants to jump off a fucking bridge but we tolerate it because they're Useful (and, we're getting rid of DST, because we've recognized that its Not So Useful, again, Usefulness drives everything).
Here's what's going to happen: they'll invent some kind of new Lunar Time with 29.35 earth-day long days or some other nonsense. Every clock on the wall at Moonbase Alpha will have both Lunar Time and UTC and probably US Central Time because Houston & NASA. The scientists who invent it will pat themselves on the back. The janitors who clean the place will have their shifts scheduled in UTC hours and the Gregorian calendar ("yeah man I'm off at 8pm and I don't work again till Monday, yeah I guess it is weird that its been night outside for two weeks yet we still say 'monDAY', I don't know man I just work here same as you let's grab some drinks"). In 350 years, the Martian Humans will declare independence and reject all forms of Timekeeping that Us Earthlings invented, including the one the ESA (hint: EUROPEAN space agency) tried to invent for them, because Politics. Can we just, I don't know, focus on GETTING to the moon first, before we start paying people to retrofit our microwaves with new clocks?
Idk we're planning these missions in the near/immediate future, so we need standardized times for those immediately future missions. Everything else comes later.
> Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.
...and it will make other engineers rich when they dive into the complexity, wrap a clean API around it, and start a lucrative time-as-a-service company.
Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.