August 30, 2026 | 09:55 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Countries are preparing to establish a unified lunar standard time at an international conference in Paris amid the global race to build a Moon mission station.
According to ANTARA, member states will discuss the issue at the General Conference on Weights and Measures, which sets global measurement standards, as well as plans for a permanent lunar station and navigation mission, which will be accelerated around 2030.
Both China and the United States have plans to land astronauts on the moon and utilize its resources.
According to the general theory of relativity, time on the Moon passes slightly faster than on Earth because the Moon's gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth. Therefore, lunar time is about 56 microseconds per day faster than on Earth. The time difference between Earth and the Moon is believed to pose problems for future lunar missions.
When building a base on the Moon, for example, operators must know the exact location of the work. To do this, signals from satellites orbiting the Moon will be used to calculate position, similar to the GPS on Earth.
The time on the Moon must be accurate because an error of just one microsecond can alter the Moon’s position by 300 meters. This could disrupt robots deployed to build "stations" on the Moon.
Mamoru Sekido, a research manager at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, said international cooperation to coordinate and unify time standards for satellites is crucial for lunar development.
Currently, two proposals have emerged to determine lunar time. The first proposal was to use a hypothetical clock at the Moon's center of mass and measure time from there.
The second proposal is to use a real clock aligned with the average altitude of the Moon's surface as a reference. This is similar to how time is measured on Earth.
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