What time is it on the moon?: Space agencies consider common time zone for lunar missions

The European Space Agency is very actively verifying to give the Moon a time zone. The idea was also discussed last year during a meeting in the Netherlands, where participants agreed on the urgent need to establish “a common lunar reference time,” said Pietro Giordano, a navigation systems engineer at the European Space Agency.

“A joint international effort is now being launched to achieve this,” Giordano said in a statement, according to the AP news agency.

Space experts claim that an internationally accepted common time zone for the Moon will make coordination easier and more countries will be able to launch their own separate lunar missions. Recently, the private space sector has also shown interest in lunar missions.

While designing and building the International Space Station (ISS) NASA Considered the idea too. The ISS however runs on Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which is based on atomic clocks and helps divide time zones among the world’s various space agencies.

Stakeholders are also debating whether any one organization should determine and maintain the time on the Moon. There is also a technical aspect to the issue as clocks run faster on the Moon than on Earth. The ticking also occurs differently on the lunar surface and in lunar orbit.

According to the website, Space.com Earth-based GNSS also relies on the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRS), a three-dimensional coordinate system for Earth established in 1991. This allows for frequent measurement of precise distances between points on our planet. Moon navigation would require a uniform, internationally accepted Moon-centric – or “selenocentric” – coordinate reference frame.