SCIENTISTS WITH NOTHING BETTER TO DO, ARGUE ABOUT LUNAR TIME ZONE

NPR got James Olthoff, a delegate to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, on the air to answer a question with no official answer: what time is it on the moon. Right now the answer is Houston time. That is what Apollo did, along with mission elapsed time, a clock that starts at liftoff and just counts up. The problem is gravity. It is weaker up there, so lunar clocks run fast, roughly 56 microseconds a day ahead of Earth by the NIST calculation. Nobody is missing dinner over 56 microseconds. Navigation is a different story. GPS satellites gain about 38 microseconds a day, and engineers deliberately slow those clocks before launch so your phone doesn't route you into a lake. So the paperwork is moving. The White House told NASA in April 2024 to have Coordinated Lunar Time figured out by the end of 2026. The International Astronomical Union defined a Lunar Coordinate Time that same year. This month the General Conference on Weights and Measures met at Versailles with a resolution on a lunar reference time scale traceable to UTC, because of course moon time gets settled in a French convention center. Olthoff says the simple option is a clock built just for the moon. The hard option is one time system for the entire solar system, which would also cover Mars whenever we get around to screwing that up too.

Why you should give a shit: A lunar day is almost a month long, so the real scandal isn't the missing time zone, it's that the most boring document in the space program is the only thing keeping two landers from parking in the same crater.