48
White House directs NASA to create time standard for the moon
(www.reuters.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
48 points (100.0% liked)
Space
7242 readers
1 users here now
News and findings about our cosmos.
Subcommunity of Science
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
As a software developer, the last thing I want to see is another obscure timezone to deal with. It does seem like it'd be important to set a standard here though, and it's unlikely to affect most software engineers anyway unless we start seeing colonization at some point.
Also, in general, I can't imagine how relativity will work with this kind of timezone conversion.
Relativity is exactly the problem, time runs at a different speed on the moon. I have no idea how this is supposed to be handled in software.
Like if you have a lunar instant of time and an earth time and you want to figure out how much time happened between those two instants, I guess you'll essentially need to decide on a frame of reference and then take into account relativity as you convert the lunar time to UTC. But I'm not a physicist, I'm not sure if doing that even makes sense.
Just use accelerometers to measure specific gravity and have time be a function of that measurement. Problem solved!
If it was that easy, I don't think the US government would have mandated a whole project to figure it out. NASA would have done it by now and been using it internally for a while before anybody noticed.
That's not sarcasm - that's kinda how NASA solves weird (to baselines) problems like this. They just sort of do it, it's done, and then somebody might get around to publishing a paper about it. At least in the years I worked there (GSFC, 2010-2013) it used to be a thing that engineers would chat about while waiting for the coffee maker to finish brewing a fresh pot, or maybe doodle on a bad while waiting for a run to finish.