China is over the moon with its new lunar timekeeping system – Jalopnik

The new race to the moon has begun and China appears to be leading the way. China has already successfully tested a lunar lander, while SpaceX continues to blow up spaceships and NASA stumbles despite pointless executive orders. Now Chinese researchers have developed a lunar timekeeping system that keeps clocks accurate during long-duration lunar missions, reports Gizmodo.

Researchers from China’s Purple Mountain Observatory have published an article in Astronomy and astrophysics with the details of LTE440, their software for tracking lunar time and adjusting it to stay in sync with Earth time. This software has been released to the public at Githubwith a user manual available at The Harvard University Astrophysics Data Systemamong others.

Although NASA is already working on its Coordinated Lunar Time standard, the Chinese system is the first to be released. The researchers who developed it say it is so accurate that it will remain within just a few tens of nanoseconds for the next thousand years. South China morning mail. However, NASA will likely continue to develop its own system, especially considering that the US has already banned Chinese cars, hardware and software used for communications or autonomous driving.

However, these occurred before GPS-based navigation, which uses accurate atomic clocks to help identify your location. The moon currently has no GPS, but a similar system will be needed in the future for accurate landings and navigation of the lunar surface. This time correction will also be necessary for long-duration lunar missions to ensure that everyone uses the same time instead of getting out of sync for months and years on the lunar surface.

It will be interesting to see what NASA will come up with to achieve coordinated lunar time. If the Chinese have devised a highly accurate system, the math involved is valid no matter who writes the software that runs it. Will NASA come up with an even better way to do this, or copy the Purple Mountain Observatory’s public notes?