White House orders NASA to develop lunar time standard for celestial bodies

April 3 (UPI) -- The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced it will work to create time standards for the moon and other celestial bodies.

"A unified time standard -- Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) will act as the established standard to enable cislunar operations and can be tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time on Earth," the White House said in a press release Tuesday.

The office said it directed NASA to work with the state, commerce, defense and transportation departments to deliver a strategy to implement the LTC by no later than Dec. 31, 2026.

In addition to coordinating with UTC, the White House said the new time system must be accurate enough to support "precision navigation and science," resilient in the event of lost contact with Earth and be able to scale to environments beyond the Earth-moon system.

The new time standards are being implemented to address a phenomenon called Gravitational Time Dilation, the fact that time moves differently under different circumstances, affected by gravity or speed.

"Time passes differently in different parts of space -- for example, time appears to pass more slowly where gravity is stranger, like near celestial bodies -- and as a result the length of a second Earth is different to an observer under different gravitational conditions, such as on the moon," said OSTP Deputy Director for National Security Steve Welby.

While time dilation is an advanced concept that was discovered via Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, it is part of daily life, as GPS satellites need to take time dilation into account due to the fact that time moves more slowly for a fast-moving object than for a stationary object.

Future space travel to other celestial bodies would require time dilation to be taken into account when coordinating with mission controllers on Earth.

"As NASA, private companies, and space agencies around the world launch missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it's important that we establish celestial time standards for safety and accuracy," said Welby.