No, the moon’s rotation isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. I’m not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it’s tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I’m not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I’m pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).
Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.
“An atomic clock on the moon will tick at a different rate than a clock on Earth,” said Kevin Coggins, Nasa’s top communications and navigation official. “It makes sense that when you go to another body, like the moon or Mars, that each one gets its own heartbeat.”
There’s more than that though, due to Daylight Saving Time. The rules for DST are part of the definition of the time zone. For example, in Australia, Queensland and Victoria are both UTC+10. However, Victoria observes DST while Queensland doesn’t, so technically they’re two separate timezones (in the Olsen database, they’re Australia/Melbourne and Australia/Brisbane respectively).
Yep, relativity accounts for a difference of like 50ms drift per earth day. I would assume that it’s forward drifting if you’re on earth but backwards if you’re on the moon.
It’s been a long time since I took modern physics, so I’m not positive, but I think you’re right that the moon would have time moving slower, and if your 50ms/day is right (edit: I based this on the moon traveling faster than the earth, but I don’t know anything about gravitational relativity, so that’s probably wrong) then you’d need to do something like skip a second every 20th day on the moon to keep pace with Earth. We could call it an “anti-leap-second”
Programmers, that seems pretty simple; what’s the big deal? /s
The moon’s day length is so long that it wouldn’t make any sense for any crewed mission to use it, they’re going to need their own lights on an arbitrary 24 hour cycle anyway, so there’s no reason not to have every future crewed mission there use the same one
I mean, this is the real answer here, but you can’t just put them on UTC because of the relativity like we were discussing elsewhere, so it would still have to be a separate time zone for programming and timekeeping purposes, even if humans won’t be able to tell the difference
Shouldn’t the moon have… 24 time zones as well, depending where on the moon you currently are?
No, the moon’s rotation isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. I’m not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it’s tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I’m not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I’m pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).
Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.
article
It’s possible that they don’t end up putting atomic clocks on the moon, but it’s on the table, they haven’t worked out the details yet.
Even if you just count UTC offsets, there’s 38 time zones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone
There’s more than that though, due to Daylight Saving Time. The rules for DST are part of the definition of the time zone. For example, in Australia, Queensland and Victoria are both UTC+10. However, Victoria observes DST while Queensland doesn’t, so technically they’re two separate timezones (in the Olsen database, they’re
Australia/MelbourneandAustralia/Brisbanerespectively).Yep, relativity accounts for a difference of like 50ms drift per earth day. I would assume that it’s forward drifting if you’re on earth but backwards if you’re on the moon.
Take that, timezone whiners!
It’s been a long time since I took modern physics, so I’m not positive, but I think you’re right that the moon would have time moving slower, and if your 50ms/day is right (edit: I based this on the moon traveling faster than the earth, but I don’t know anything about gravitational relativity, so that’s probably wrong) then you’d need to do something like skip a second every 20th day on the moon to keep pace with Earth. We could call it an “anti-leap-second”
Programmers, that seems pretty simple; what’s the big deal? /s
HORROR
We’re close to skipping a second too here on earth since the Earth had actually sped up a bit the past decade.
i heard, can’t wait for satellites to fall out of the sky because of this one second
The moon’s day length is so long that it wouldn’t make any sense for any crewed mission to use it, they’re going to need their own lights on an arbitrary 24 hour cycle anyway, so there’s no reason not to have every future crewed mission there use the same one
I mean, this is the real answer here, but you can’t just put them on UTC because of the relativity like we were discussing elsewhere, so it would still have to be a separate time zone for programming and timekeeping purposes, even if humans won’t be able to tell the difference
So, just plonk an atomic clock on the moon and call that moon time. Ocasionally synchronize moon time with UTC.