Space is the final frontier… for timekeeping, at least!

With the push to land humans on the moon, especially for extended periods, the need to have a “moon time” becomes even more critical. You see, time passes differently on the Moon than it does on Earth. 

Currently, space missions communicate with team members on Earth using coordinated universal time (UTC) as a common time. However, this won't work on the moon as a lunar clock would gain about 56 microseconds over the course of an Earth day. If humans on the Moon operated with normal clocks, they would completely desynchronize from Earth time.

The return-to-space-race, if you will, is made up of many sprints, across several fields of engineering and space science. One of the sprints is the race to define time itself.

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