The moon has never had an hour independent of the earth. Each lunar mission has been assigned its own time, always linked to the Earth’s zone, known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is an hour or two more than Spanish Peninsula Time, depending on the time of year. An inaccurate, inefficient and unapproved method among the ships visiting the satellite. The European (ESA) and US (NASA) space agencies are looking to improve on this as a decade of space exploration renaissance lies ahead.
“We live in an extraordinary moment. This year, for example, three commercial missions are to be sent, a paradigm shift in lunar exploration,” says ESA engineer Javier Ventura-Traveset, who sees this as a full-fledged revolution. Goals already outlined in the space plans include the proliferation of commercial missions by private companies, new national players (such as India or Japan) and the establishment of permanently inhabited bases before 2030. A more plausible scenario than in previous decades, now that the American agency has even introduced the new costumes she will wear to the moon.
Measuring lunar time from Earth will always cause precision problems, explains Ventura-Traveset, coordinator of the Moonlight Initiative. [luz de luna] from ESA: “Due to general relativity, for example, two identical clocks set at the same time, one on Earth and one on the moon’s surface, will show different times because the moon’s gravity is much less than Earth’s, hence the lunar clock is on the order of 56 microseconds a day ahead on Earth.The aerospace engineer clarifies that “it may not seem like much, but after a while both clocks show different times.”A subtle effect that reveals a weaker gravitational pull the moon causes clocks to run slower, which must be corrected to synchronize satellites and promote interoperability of systems.
An independent spindle of the earth
More than 50 years have passed since the last manned mission to the moon, North America’s Apollo 17, and space exploration has once again become a priority for international authorities and public interest. For the European Space Agency it is a crucial moment in the race for space exploration and the terrestrial satellite plays a crucial role in the new chapter: dozens of planned missions and even a permanent station orbiting the moon constantly and in 10 years , that explained Aim to land Europeans on it.
We live in an extraordinary moment, there is a revolution on the moon
Javier Ventura-Traveset, ESA
The more than 12 manned space missions calculated for the next few years pose logistical challenges ranging from technological to philosophical. An independent time zone for the terrestrial forces us to answer a seemingly simple but very complicated question: what time is it on the moon?
A recent congress held by ESA in the Netherlands started defining the lunar spindle to improve interoperability between satellites from different agencies and improve coordination. Ventura-Traveset says it aims to develop its own LunaNet satellite-based geolocation navigation system, a system similar to America’s GPS or Europe’s Galileo, as the agency explains in its document, a “selenistic timeframe.” The idea is that by 2024, ESA and NASA will place four strategic satellites on the moon, each with its atomic clock, the most accurate measurement model to date, to triangulate the position and time it takes for the moons to arrive. Signals everyone and agree on an official time.
Artist’s rendering of the LunaNet concept.NASA/Reese Patillo
The ESA Moonlight project, led by Ventura-Traveset, aims to override the previously used method of communication: each spacecraft or manned lunar module, with its independent time, had to send its radio signals back to terrestrial antennas in order to then return to the satellite. A useful system, although it is an infrastructure that, according to the space agency itself, will not be enough. With the space exploration scenario looming on the horizon, the multiple ships working simultaneously on the moon pose a problem, in addition to the microsecond delay present in all emissions, as well as their lack of precision in positioning via lunar satellites.
Improving communications is what Ventura-Traveset relies on to describe the importance of its initiative: “Having communications and navigation on land has been an extraordinary multiplier of our economic activity”, more than 10% of GDP of the European economy, “and the same can happen on the moon”. “The possibilities for new applications are enormous: for example, having permanent lunar settlements,” he summarizes. The ESA engineer stresses the value of the new space economy, the services that private companies have offered in recent years, as they allow scientific instruments to be brought to agencies, universities or other private actors at “low cost”.
Thanks to this, Ventura-Traveset is already looking to the future: “Europe’s big dream is to have an astronaut on the moon’s surface before 2030. That is the goal, and a permanent communication and navigation infrastructure is an essential step towards it.”
The value of the measurement time
Since the beginning of time, measuring time has been essential. The Mayans of Yucatan believed they could actively control its river, and in Asia it was vital to maritime navigation millennia ago. Late 19th century to organize the departure and timetable of trains in Paris, but it is also today in the modern economy: to coordinate international flights, the logistics of transatlantic shipments, satellite telecommunications, for streaming or geolocation on our mobile . Although it is not easy to define what time is: “Until Einstein appeared a century ago and revolutionized our concept of time, time was thought to be a compact block, an absolute! It was called God’s time, a system that never changed,” confirms cosmologist Jonás Chaves-Montero.
Chaves-Montero, a researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), studies gravity: “When time really began to be understood, it was the theory of relativity, dealing with time and gravity, that explained all the phenomena that we have know: where you are, the mass, for example on a planet like earth, affects the passage of time; a bigger one, even faster”. Therefore, time on the moon is slowing down and affecting technology as devices move within microseconds when positioning and precision is vital to the correct future of space missions. . Chaves-Montero believes that the space initiative to adjust for lunar time rests on a deep “knowledge of physics and its implementation”.
Tracy Caldwell Dyson (NASA), looking at Earth through the dome of the International Space Station (ISS), September 2010.NASA
The photographs of galactic constellations by the James Webb Space Telescope show not only impressively but also that there is no “now” in cosmology. “We never see the present, we have images of what the universe looked like as a baby 300,000 years ago, the maximum that light allows us, a superprimitive moment and there’s the cosmic microwave background, beyond that it becomes opaque,” Chaves- explains Hunter. For the researcher, looking at the cosmos is a window into the past, a gigantic mind shift: “When you look at your hands, the moon or the sun, there is always a delay of microseconds to minutes, and with galaxies, we talking about millions of years, how long, the farther we look, the further in time we see; The universe is a time machine. Therefore, any navigation system must account for temporary imbalances.
Another of the counterintuitive paradoxes that manned missions to lunar soil will face is the definition of a “day.” The satellite takes 29.5 days to orbit itself, but the biology of the lunar modules will continue to be the same, 24 hours. Due to physiological imperatives, Earth days will always be important, even if we change our immediate context to a satellite or another planet: “We have predetermined circuits that work cyclically and with more or less periodicity, such as heart rate or hormone regulation”. Details from biologist Luis Martínez of the Alicante Institute of Neurosciences.
This CSIC neuroscientist draws a comparison to what’s currently happening on the International Space Station (ISS), with roughly 16 sunrises in a 24-hour human cycle. To avoid problems caused by insomnia and illnesses caused by poor rest, they have schedules to adjust to the Earth’s circadian rhythm. Martínez wonders whether a different rhythm of life will be possible for Homo sapiens: “Three days of travel or 500 days of space missions pass, we will indisputably remain human due to millions of years of evolution. Somehow they have to fulfill a cycle of day and night.”
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