By the tiniest bit, lunar clock moves faster than earth’s clock.
The origin story of earth and moon have been a focus of research for centuries. Humans have also reached the lunar surface multiple times. After lot of research, scientists found that time of moon moves a bit faster than earth's time. Modern research have calculated the time gap also. In this article, we will discuss about this importance of time gap in detail.
Time differences between different cosmic bodies with varying gravitational pulls are common. One of the major takeaways from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is gravity affects time. As per the theory “The stronger an object’s gravity, the more time is stretched, making it pass more slowly.” In simple words, if you ever get a chance to travel other planet/object in space woth lesser mass than Earth, the time would move a bit faster. Even in different heights, movement of time changes. The time moves faster at the peak of Mt. Everest than a beach area. The moon experiences one-sixth of Earth's gravity causing a change in time.
All those observations helped scientists to estimate how fast lunar clock moves than earth’s clock.
The Moon is ahead of us in the earth by the end of a day is 57 millionths (0.0000575) of a second. Simply, the moon has moved about 1.1 seconds ahead of the earth ever since the last time humans were on the Moon.
Slava Turyshev, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the study, said: “This is the Solar System's common centre of mass, around which the Sun, planets and satellites orbit in a delicate balance.”
You might feel this difference insignificant, but this tiny difference could be the crucial factor for success or failure of upcoming manned missions. These estimations hold utmost importance as NASA is preparing for sending humans back to the moon in 2026 as part of the upcoming Artemis mission. For the success of this mission, scientists need to sync up the navigation systems.
“Infrastructure on Earth such as GPS provides time down to the nanosecond level,” NASA's Cheryl Gramling, a navigation systems engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland told. “If you're trying to navigate or land on the Moon, and avoid dangerous areas, then that precision matters,” he added.
You might have heard about time zone of different continents, however, scientists are now planning to develop a Lunar Standard Time for space exploration. This would lead to create an entire lunar network, dubbed as LunaNet.
“You can think of LunaNet like the internet — or the internet and a global navigation satellite system all combined. It’s a framework of standards that contributors to LunaNet (such as NASA or the European Space Agency) would follow,” mentioned Gramling.
Scientists are also preparing to establish rail tracks on the lunar surface to transfer humans and cargo. There are several other plans including installation of atomic clocks on the lunar surface.
