On Tuesday the Biden administration called on NASA to set an internationally useful standard for measuring time on the moon and other celestial bodies — where clocks behave differently than they do on Earth. As reported by Reuters, a memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directed the agency to work with other federal government bodies to create a plan for what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) by the end of 2026. LTC would be the space version of the Earth's time standard of UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time.
The White House orders come as the private-sector space race heats up. And U.S. officials told the outlet that without a way for the increasingly crowded field to synchronize their watches, space-farers risk safety issues — ranging from data-transfer security and communications timing, to actual planetary landing mapping.
