July 11th, 2024

A Relativistic Framework to Establish Coordinate Time on the Moon and Beyond

The paper discusses establishing a coordinate time framework for celestial bodies like the Moon based on Einstein's theory of relativity. It highlights the importance of synchronized clocks for accurate communication and navigation.

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A Relativistic Framework to Establish Coordinate Time on the Moon and Beyond

The paper discusses the establishment of a coordinate time framework for celestial bodies like the Moon based on Einstein's theory of relativity. It explains how the rate of standard clocks is affected by gravitational potential and relative motion, leading to the need for synchronized clocks to compare local time variations due to gravitational and kinematic effects. The framework introduces a relationship between coordinate times for the Moon and Earth, highlighting differences in clock rates. This understanding is crucial for communication infrastructure, navigation in cislunar space, and ensuring interoperability of position, navigation, and timing systems across celestial bodies. The research emphasizes the importance of accurate estimation of rate differences across celestial bodies for reliable communications and precise navigation in the solar system.

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By @jvanderbot - 5 months
It strikes me as surprising to imply that we don't have time-keeping standards for solar system exploration that take into account relativistic differences.

the CSPICE toolkit from JPL/NAIF has a bunch of routines to calculate local time, local time of arrival of events from other places (light cone, I suppose?), down to the nanosecond.

By @alganet - 5 months
> yielding 58.721 μs/day

Can someone kind explain this unit for me? microseconds per day.

Does that mean that the relativistic difference is cummulative? In other words, does it add up over time?

By @nickdothutton - 5 months
I wonder if Sci-Fi novels contain any info on time representation, reference, and distribution.
By @akozak - 5 months
It's a neat idea that you could publish a paper like this that establishes a framework for thousands of years.
By @jiehong - 5 months
Nice!

It made me realise that we currently live in a time that can never be accurately referenced outside the planet.

So no software can ever truly define 2024-07-11T00:00 on Pluto.

It also makes me think that the Mass Relais in Mass Effects could actually also be atomic clocks forming this galactic time grid of reference, so in-game lore seems less implausible.

By @argumentofperi - 5 months
Numerical evaluation of Eq. (4) yields a value 1.2695 × 10^−12(cos(f ) + e) or 0.1097(cos(f ) + e) μs/day.

Typo?

By @engineer_22 - 5 months
In the abstract they hint that without a common clock communication could be inhibited
By @bloopernova - 5 months
Now I'm wondering just how timekeeping would work with distance and/or high relative velocity. Would you observe "ship time" until you returned to base, and would then sync ship to base time?
By @davidw - 5 months
"I was in favour of space exploration until I realised what it'd mean for date time libraries"

https://x.com/joe_jag/status/510048646482894848?lang=en

By @hlieberman - 5 months
Missed opportunity to name it "stardate".