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The US federal government has asked Nasa to develop a time zone for the Moon before it begins any new missions to the lunar surface.

The head of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) wants Nasa to “work with other US agencies and international agencies to establish a moon-centric time reference system” by the end of 2026, said The Guardian. The system will be called coordinated lunar time (LTC).

Nasa is due to begin its new lunar programme, Artemis, in 2026, which will see an American crew land on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. Artemis could also establish the first scientific base on the Moon, which could “help set the stage for future missions to Mars”.

Why is Nasa creating coordinated lunar time?

Relative to the Earth, time moves more quickly on the Moon – 58.7 microseconds faster each day – because of the weaker gravitational pull. Satellites and lunar craft involved in the upcoming missions need to operate with “extreme precision”, and so establishing LTC is vital to maximising the chances of success.

It not only aids mapping and locating positions but ensures “data transfers between spacecraft are secure and that communications between Earth, satellites, bases and astronauts are synchronised”, said Sky News.

The Earth’s internationally recognised time, to which all time zones are synchronised, is universal coordinated time (UTC), which is established through a series of atomic clocks placed in various locations around the globe. A similar system may need to be installed on the Moon to properly establish LTC.

Why is the US returning to the Moon?

Artemis, unlike the exploratory missions of Nasa’s Apollo programme, aims to “establish a sustained human presence” on the Moon, said The Times. It plans to conduct its first flyby of the Moon in 2025, before landing astronauts for the first time in 2026. From there, it hopes to set up scientific bases where astronauts will “live and work long-term, developing and testing technologies for an onward push to Mars in the 2030s”.

Those technologies include testing “a series of growth chambers” that contain vegetation including cress and duckweed to see how they grow in the Moon’s diminished gravity and the “rigours of space radiation”, said The Telegraph. Not only is it hoped the plants will provide food for astronauts but also generate oxygen for them to use.

However, the US is not the only country interested in launching manned missions to the Moon, with India and China announcing their own lunar programmes. As well as exploration, there are numerous geopolitical reasons the US wants to go back to the Moon, “after all, the moon is the ultimate high ground”, wrote George Friedman in Geopolitical Futures.

Is there a new space race?

Nasa’s plans to establish LTC come as the “modern space race heats up”, said The Times. China aims to land astronauts “sometime during or before 2030”, said Time, intending to find local ice deposits that can be “harvested for water, breathable oxygen, and even rocket fuel”.

If current schedules are correct, the US will be the first to reach the Moon. But there are complications, with technological issues affecting Nasa’s last Moon rocket launch, in 2022, and financial pressures that China does not face. Though it took a modest cut to its budget this year, Nasa receives just 0.4% of the federal budget to fund its projects, whereas it had 4% for the Apollo missions in the 1960s.

That “leaves an open field for China”, said Time, and its “command and control economy and policy-making” is what makes it so “formidable a force”.

It is unclear whether China would buy into the Americans’ LTC. Both China and Russia, the “two main US rivals in space”, said The Guardian, did not sign Nasa’s “Artemis accords”, which established a “common set of principles to govern the civil exploration and use of outer space”.

That does not rule out “lunar rapprochement” between Beijing and Washington, said Time, but it is unlikely “until economic and military tensions between the two global giants cool”.