Given that there are 86,400,000,000 microseconds in a day, we will need a leap year every 1.5 billion years to stay in sync. I think we’ll be fine.
Presumably some clocks would have to be on the surface of Luna facing Earth/Terra, and some clocks on the side facing away, so that the gravity well of the planet could be averaged out.
And if we're going to go through the trouble/expense of sending some gear, it might be useful to pack multiple instruments: if timekeeping is a long-term need, another long-term instrument could perhaps be a seismograph to measure for possible 'moonquakes'. Multiple clocks could mean multiple seismographs for better triangulation of events.
You need some sort of network connections back to Earth anyway, can't you just spare a few NTP packets here and there and be done with it?
I haven't read the underlying white paper yet and maybe that will change my mind, but the CNN article hasn't convinced me yet that this is a problem worth worrying about.
Personal computers don't care much about timing down to the nanosecond, but scientific pursuits often need that level of precision, standardizing timing with high precision would make it easier to perform experiments that depend on time correlated comparisons across the lunar surface.
It's still a weak case in my opinion, things can always be refined later.
For scientific experiments of the type one might be running on the moon? Almost certainly for at least some of them.
No.
The actual problem is a political one. Past missions have used the local time from where the mission was based. They want an agreed time for international missions.
This talk of ultra precise clocks being sent to the moon seems very unlikely to happen, as it isn't relevant to solving the political problem.
Doesn't 4G include a time synchronization service for receivers with no GPS; and is the SI second unit (which is currently defined in terms of the cesium decay) const hardcoded in the new system?
Yes, but I believe accuracy is on the order of minutes.
> is the SI second unit (which is currently defined in terms of the cesium decay) const hardcoded in the new system?
Are you saying that a moon second should be defined to be slightly longer/shorter than an earth second to compensate for the relativistic difference? That wouldn't help, since relativity affects all physical processes; if you do that, all your other measures would be off too, including e.g. length (defined as the distance light travels in a given unit of time).
Now, that's just synchronized with each other, so if the Moon is off by whatever difference in time that's not a problem. It is not like that 4/5G cell is also participating in the same RF environment as cells on Earth.
Does the time difference due to time dilation due to relativity change suddenly upon orbiting or landing on another planet spherical reference frame?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11150
Cell sites synchronize time with the network, like you phone does but they are talking about Earth time.
Did they push an update with new laws of physics, or have I completely missed something?
What am I missing here?
Does this also have an effect on your relative time?
https://www.abebooks.com/9780517884416/Relativity-Special-Ge...