July 3, 2024 • 14 mins
Scientists are returning to the moon, but when they get there, what time is it?
Dr Carly Howett from the Department of Physics explains the basics: what time is, and how we found a globalised way of understanding time zones so we can meet for a 3pm coffee or international video call, and everyone is in the right place at the right time.
But how does that translate to space and why could the consequences of incorrect timekeeping be disastrous for space craft docking missions?
If you want to get to grips with the weird and wonderful world of lunar time, then tune in to our latest podcast to find out more!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
>> Emily Elias (00:07):
Trips to the moon are back, but
when you get there, what time is it?
Like, what time zone? is it. I mean, this is just a
question that really just, like, wrinkles my brain.
Earth, the moon, we're so far apart.
How does time bring us together? What is
the link? On this episode of the Oxford Sparks
(00:27):
big Questions podcast, we are asking,
what time is it on the moon?
Hello, I'm Emily Elias, and this is the
show where we seek out the brightest minds at the University of
Oxford, and we ask them the big
questions. And for this one, we found a
(00:48):
researcher who's willing to go with us on a journey through
time and space.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (00:54):
so my name is Doctor Carly Howitt and I'm a professor of
space instrumentation at the University of Oxford.
>> Emily Elias (00:59):
Okay, so let's start with the basics.
How does time work?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (01:06):
Well, the basic concept, we sort of have this circadian rhythm, right?
We understand daytime and nighttime, and those things
are sort of built into us as people. And so the
old fashioned way of doing it would be midday is when the
sun is directly, above you, and you would
wait until the earth turned and it's midday again. And that's your
day, right? That's the length of a day. It's the sun at the highest point to the
(01:26):
sun at the highest point, and then everything else breaks down from
there. You could break those down into hours. You can break those hours
down into minutes, you can break those minutes down into seconds. But
of course, that works in a I'll see you at home
at some point kind of way, but it doesn't really work at, the.
Okay, let's meet at this place at 03:00 in the
afternoon, right. We need to. We need. We need to be a little bit more precise in
(01:46):
order to do that. And so over the years, we've
developed ways to do it.
>> Emily Elias (01:50):
So, for me, my family is in Canada, and
so midday in the UK and midday
in Canada, very different things. How did we
agree on, creating a time that
was then globalized and we all understood what
a, time zone meant and what a midday meant to us in the big
picture, right?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (02:09):
300 years ago, it didn't matter really what Canada time was on,
because you were never going to speak to them in real time. You might send a letter.
And so the origin of setting up even
within the UK. So, before we start moving internationally,
let's start with the UK. Across the UK, we had
different time zones. Midday in London.
I'm based in Oxford, so the time in Oxford is
(02:30):
five minutes difference. Midday occurs five minutes later in
Oxford than it does in London. And there was this idea of
Oxford time, and actually, that's
still registered and recognised in Oxford. When I
give a lecture, it starts at five minutes past the hour.
And the reason for that is because it's on the hour
at Oxford time, but that's five minutes later than
GMT. So there's these sort of weird foibles
(02:52):
that still happen, and that's a hangover. And it was the invention of the
railway that actually, really was one of the first things
that made us need to have a universal time.
Right? You don't fix a problem if it's not our problem.
And it wasn't until we got to go fast enough on the
railways that, that we started to need to understand,
okay, what time is this train getting in? Because we don't
want it to hit another train that's coming from a different
(03:14):
direction. Right, what is midday? You know, how
does that relate to the time in London in November,
1840? That was when the UK time was
synchronized across the railways in order to
reduce accidents and near misses. And all the times were set to
London time, which was defined as being Greenwich mean
time. And so in 1880, there was a law that basically
said, no whole of the UK is going to be on this time. And
(03:37):
that was set to Greenwich mean time. And that was really the first time
in the UK that the UK had had a time zone, right? So now
all of the UK is in a single time zone. And we'd already
talked about how a day is made up of these things that we
call hours, and it's broken up into 24 of
those. And so then you can sort of understand how
those chunks work out, right? If each span of
(03:57):
distance, right, is an hour, you can break up the whole
of the longitude of the earth into these
24 chunks. And that tells you how long an hour is going to
be. Now, whether a country adopts it is up to them, right?
Exactly where those boundaries lie is up to them. You can't
go to a different country and say you're on this time zone.
But countries that want to work together, it makes sense to be
talking the same language when it comes to time.
>> Emily Elias (04:19):
So globalization really jump started it of like,
okay, now we need to know where time. And people like
me moving around, wanting to talk to their families, obviously was
like, oh, well, we have to figure out a good time to set this
call. So that's on earth. Yes,
but I'm assuming that the
moon has time as well. The concept of
(04:40):
time is not specific to the earth.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (04:43):
That's absolutely true. So in some ways, it's
fundamentally the same. So if you consider a place on
the moon, right, just one location, say the middle of a
canyon, and it's going to be midday when the sun is
directly above you, and you're going to wait for it to rotate
and it'll be a midday again when the sun's directly above you, right? And
that's a day due to our convention, for
very old and weird reasons. We break that into
(05:05):
24 hours and you break that into 60 minutes, and then you can break that into
60 seconds. So you can do exactly the same process that we've
done on the earth, on the moon. Now, the tricky bit is how do
those things relate to each other? Right? And that's where
these differences come. This is where the conversation
gets interesting.
>> Emily Elias (05:22):
So how does it relate to each other?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (05:24):
So the reason it's a bit tricky is
because of something that was discovered around relativity, the idea
that time is different depending on how
close to a big gravity thing you
are. So if you're very close to the sun,
time is going to run at a different speed to, if you're close to the
earth and the moon is less massive than the earth,
(05:44):
about 81 times smaller than the earth, 81 times
less massive than the earth, I should say. And so time
is going to run.
>> Emily Elias (05:51):
Differently on the moon, just like fact.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (05:54):
Very slightly differently, but
different. And so that makes it hard when you want to
move between things, right. You have to understand those differences in
order to make sure you're talking about the same
time. It's a very small difference. Is that
moon time, if you had a clock on the moon and you had a clock on the earth, you made
two clocks. They're absolutely identical. Old pendulum
clocks, say, and you kept one on the earth, you sent one to the
(06:16):
moon. The one on the moon would be
at 1 second slower every 46 Earth years. So
not a huge deal. Right. You're never going to notice that. If it's just
a let's meet up for a coffee and you're using your Earth clock, but you happen
to be on the moon, that's going to be absolutely fine. But if
you're trying to do really, really intricate, especially
science or engineering, knowing time is
(06:37):
fundamental, and that's where it becomes really important.
>> Emily Elias (06:40):
We're in this sort of like, moon age
part, duh, I don't know what they're calling it, where all of a sudden, like,
we're going back to the moon, people are, we're doing
experiments on the moon. Again. So, like,
how important does
this 1 second become?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (06:56):
The important thing becomes when you're trying to communicate which
time zone you're in. So imagine you're trying to find
out how far a rock is away from you. And the way you're going to
do that is you're going to fire a laser and you're going to wait for the
return signal, okay? So it's going to go to the rock and then it's going to
bounce off, and then it's going to come back to you. And by we know the speed
of light in a vacuum, the moon's a vacuum. And
(07:16):
by looking at that time difference, we can work out how far
away the rock is. Okay, now, if our
time's wrong, the distance is wrong. So now extend
that idea to, say, docking two spacecraft that are coming
together and we want to fit them together so maybe
astronauts can pass between them. maybe we're getting
samples back, whatever. And so all of a sudden
(07:36):
your time error is translated into a distance
error, which then could be a fundamental flaw in that
docking procedure. So it becomes a really, really
important thing quite quickly.
>> Emily Elias (07:48):
and nobody wants anything to go kaboom. So not a good
time. so how do we then figure out
what time it is on the moon? Is there
somebody who's sitting there trying to
decide? Okay, this
is what moon time is. And everybody should subscribe to
this formula as what moon time is.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (08:08):
So there's been lots of different countries going back to the
moon, right. We've seen chinese space agency go back to the moon.
The UK has had some interactions with going back to the moon,
and the big one that's coming up is the alchemist program, which is an
american program to put humans back on the moon.
And so there's lots of interest. And so it's
actually the Americans. I think when you send people, all of a sudden the
(08:28):
stakes are higher, right. If a
robot explodes, that's non ideal.
If bad things happen to humans, that's absolute disaster.
>> Emily Elias (08:37):
So that's very bad. That is bad.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (08:39):
Absolutely. So they're leading an effort called
coordinated lunar time, or LTC, and they're
trying to come up with a, basically a framework for agreeing
on how time is going to work on the moon. That would
work well for the Americans if they're only dealing with Americans,
right? If you're talking to yourself and you're all agreed on the same time zone, then you're
absolutely fine.
>> Emily Elias (08:57):
It's like if you're in Houston and you're talking to the base
that is on the moon base. And it's those two specific
points that are talking to each other. Other. Easy
breezy.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (09:06):
Right. The trouble is, most of these big projects
aren't done just with one country. There's lots of
interagency coordination, and so
it's going to be getting buy in from the other countries, making sure that
other countries are using the same time zone, so
that we're talking apples and apples and not accidentally
apples and oranges when we talk about time. So I think,
it makes sense that it's coming now. We're doing more and more things
(09:29):
on the moon. The stakes are getting higher and
higher. and so having some form of lunar time
makes sense. And, of course, how that maps onto Earth
time is one of the important parts of this process,
making sure that we have a way of translating lunar
time to universal time, which is what's used
in space. It's equivalent to GMT, but it's
referred to as universal time. And
(09:51):
so, having that mapping is going to be important.
>> Emily Elias (09:53):
Okay, I'm m going to ask, like, a bit of, like, a weird question, but, like,
bear with me. So on the earth, there's,
like, differences in time zones between
England and Canada, right. We've got, like,
hours and hours. Or Australia, it's like 10 hours different,
right. So, like, if you're on the moon
and you're at multiple locations on the
(10:13):
moon, would those multiple locations
have different time zones?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (10:19):
So the reason that we have time zones is because
we coordinate between different people, different objects
within that time zone. Right. So we want to make sure we're all talking the same
language. Whether we really need a time
zone on the moon comes down to how we're using time.
I would argue that for science, we probably don't.
What we actually need to know is what the local time is. So
(10:39):
that really does mean, you know, it's, it's midday
when the sun's overhead in that particular area, because
it's not like we have trains going across the moon, but
we need to know how that does map. So
it's to be decided whether we break these things up
into 24 chunks, and then it's, you know, this bit of
land is, you know, midday. The next one is 01:00
(11:00):
p.m. blah, blah, 02:00 p.m. all the way around until you're back to
midday again. And that obviously then shifts
as the moon rotates or whether we don't
need it, you know? So I think it really depends
on how we're going to be using time
as to whether we really need time zones or
nothing. Traditionally, it's been a way that
it's been useful for the people of a land
(11:23):
to have the same time zone. But if that's not
true on the moon, then do we really need it? And so I think that's
still a bit to be decided.
>> Emily Elias (11:31):
So who decides this, then?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (11:33):
So that's the $64 million question, right. No one
can enforce, as a european, you can't enforce a
japanese space agency to use a convention.
You can only sort of come up with an idea and make
it so good that people want to adopt
it because they see the use, they see that having a
common language is useful. And I think that's the way
(11:53):
it gets adopted. There are some agencies like the
IOU.
>> Emily Elias (11:57):
What's that?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (11:58):
Yes. The IAU is the international astronomical union, and
it kind of a coming together of scientists to
try and come up with a way of governing
how we name things, how we call things, and
how we group things together. So there are some sort of quote
unquote regulations, but that doesn't mean that a specific
country has to adopt it. Right. It's more like a guideline. But I
(12:18):
think in the history of science,
things have been adopted that have been the most useful. Right. We use
maths to describe science because it describes it in such an
elegant way. And I think that, if we can come up with some
form of coordinated lunar time, it will be used because
it's convenient to do so.
>> Emily Elias (12:34):
So there's a massive orbiting
sphere hanging out around us, and
it's only a second different time to us.
It's like, what is happening?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (12:46):
Well, and, that's because the earth and the moon are, locked. Right. We
only see the same side of the moon. We rotate
at the same, the same rate. And there's lots of good dynamical reasons
why that happens. But if we had a moon that wasn't
doing that, if we had a moon that was tumbling, right. So it's dynamically
just all over the place. It was like, what? Then you
wouldn't see that, right. The time would be really difficult
(13:07):
to measure because if it's moving
in a chaotic way, really, you can't predict what
the time is going to be in, say, four earth
hours. Right. It's going to be too crazy. So the
fact that we're in this sort of locked system means
that actually the time difference isn't too big. But
if you went to some, if you start comparing
(13:27):
to local time on some tumbling asteroids,
then you're then you're in for a bad time. That's going to be really
difficult.
>> Emily Elias (13:35):
I didn't even think of asteroids. this is why you're the
scientist.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (13:38):
Things are quite nice to think about because mostly the big ones are tidally
locked, so the same face is their parent planet the whole
time. But there are a lot of bodies out there and they
start like, what do you do with comets? You know, comets are
doing their thing. They're going around the sun. It's. They're a whole mess
as well. So there's lots of things to worry about
that are harder than the moon. But starting with the moon is a good
(13:58):
thing because we need it. These decisions are always driven by
necessity, and, we need it for the moon.
>> Emily Elias (14:10):
This podcast was brought to you by Oxford Sparks from the
University of Oxford with music by John Lyons and a
special thanks to Carly Howitt. Tell us what you think about this podcast. We
are on the Internet at ah, Oxfordsparks. Or you can go to our
website, oxfordsparks ox
ac UK. I'm Emily Elias and
I'm not confident what time it is. Bye for now.
Trips to the moon are back, but
when you get there, what time is it?
Like, what time zone? is it. I mean, this is just a
question that really just, like, wrinkles my brain.
Earth, the moon, we're so far apart.
How does time bring us together? What is
the link? On this episode of the Oxford Sparks
(00:27):
big Questions podcast, we are asking,
what time is it on the moon?
Hello, I'm Emily Elias, and this is the
show where we seek out the brightest minds at the University of
Oxford, and we ask them the big
questions. And for this one, we found a
(00:48):
researcher who's willing to go with us on a journey through
time and space.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (00:54):
so my name is Doctor Carly Howitt and I'm a professor of
space instrumentation at the University of Oxford.
>> Emily Elias (00:59):
Okay, so let's start with the basics.
How does time work?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (01:06):
Well, the basic concept, we sort of have this circadian rhythm, right?
We understand daytime and nighttime, and those things
are sort of built into us as people. And so the
old fashioned way of doing it would be midday is when the
sun is directly, above you, and you would
wait until the earth turned and it's midday again. And that's your
day, right? That's the length of a day. It's the sun at the highest point to the
(01:26):
sun at the highest point, and then everything else breaks down from
there. You could break those down into hours. You can break those hours
down into minutes, you can break those minutes down into seconds. But
of course, that works in a I'll see you at home
at some point kind of way, but it doesn't really work at, the.
Okay, let's meet at this place at 03:00 in the
afternoon, right. We need to. We need. We need to be a little bit more precise in
(01:46):
order to do that. And so over the years, we've
developed ways to do it.
>> Emily Elias (01:50):
So, for me, my family is in Canada, and
so midday in the UK and midday
in Canada, very different things. How did we
agree on, creating a time that
was then globalized and we all understood what
a, time zone meant and what a midday meant to us in the big
picture, right?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (02:09):
300 years ago, it didn't matter really what Canada time was on,
because you were never going to speak to them in real time. You might send a letter.
And so the origin of setting up even
within the UK. So, before we start moving internationally,
let's start with the UK. Across the UK, we had
different time zones. Midday in London.
I'm based in Oxford, so the time in Oxford is
(02:30):
five minutes difference. Midday occurs five minutes later in
Oxford than it does in London. And there was this idea of
Oxford time, and actually, that's
still registered and recognised in Oxford. When I
give a lecture, it starts at five minutes past the hour.
And the reason for that is because it's on the hour
at Oxford time, but that's five minutes later than
GMT. So there's these sort of weird foibles
(02:52):
that still happen, and that's a hangover. And it was the invention of the
railway that actually, really was one of the first things
that made us need to have a universal time.
Right? You don't fix a problem if it's not our problem.
And it wasn't until we got to go fast enough on the
railways that, that we started to need to understand,
okay, what time is this train getting in? Because we don't
want it to hit another train that's coming from a different
(03:14):
direction. Right, what is midday? You know, how
does that relate to the time in London in November,
1840? That was when the UK time was
synchronized across the railways in order to
reduce accidents and near misses. And all the times were set to
London time, which was defined as being Greenwich mean
time. And so in 1880, there was a law that basically
said, no whole of the UK is going to be on this time. And
(03:37):
that was set to Greenwich mean time. And that was really the first time
in the UK that the UK had had a time zone, right? So now
all of the UK is in a single time zone. And we'd already
talked about how a day is made up of these things that we
call hours, and it's broken up into 24 of
those. And so then you can sort of understand how
those chunks work out, right? If each span of
(03:57):
distance, right, is an hour, you can break up the whole
of the longitude of the earth into these
24 chunks. And that tells you how long an hour is going to
be. Now, whether a country adopts it is up to them, right?
Exactly where those boundaries lie is up to them. You can't
go to a different country and say you're on this time zone.
But countries that want to work together, it makes sense to be
talking the same language when it comes to time.
>> Emily Elias (04:19):
So globalization really jump started it of like,
okay, now we need to know where time. And people like
me moving around, wanting to talk to their families, obviously was
like, oh, well, we have to figure out a good time to set this
call. So that's on earth. Yes,
but I'm assuming that the
moon has time as well. The concept of
(04:40):
time is not specific to the earth.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (04:43):
That's absolutely true. So in some ways, it's
fundamentally the same. So if you consider a place on
the moon, right, just one location, say the middle of a
canyon, and it's going to be midday when the sun is
directly above you, and you're going to wait for it to rotate
and it'll be a midday again when the sun's directly above you, right? And
that's a day due to our convention, for
very old and weird reasons. We break that into
(05:05):
24 hours and you break that into 60 minutes, and then you can break that into
60 seconds. So you can do exactly the same process that we've
done on the earth, on the moon. Now, the tricky bit is how do
those things relate to each other? Right? And that's where
these differences come. This is where the conversation
gets interesting.
>> Emily Elias (05:22):
So how does it relate to each other?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (05:24):
So the reason it's a bit tricky is
because of something that was discovered around relativity, the idea
that time is different depending on how
close to a big gravity thing you
are. So if you're very close to the sun,
time is going to run at a different speed to, if you're close to the
earth and the moon is less massive than the earth,
(05:44):
about 81 times smaller than the earth, 81 times
less massive than the earth, I should say. And so time
is going to run.
>> Emily Elias (05:51):
Differently on the moon, just like fact.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (05:54):
Very slightly differently, but
different. And so that makes it hard when you want to
move between things, right. You have to understand those differences in
order to make sure you're talking about the same
time. It's a very small difference. Is that
moon time, if you had a clock on the moon and you had a clock on the earth, you made
two clocks. They're absolutely identical. Old pendulum
clocks, say, and you kept one on the earth, you sent one to the
(06:16):
moon. The one on the moon would be
at 1 second slower every 46 Earth years. So
not a huge deal. Right. You're never going to notice that. If it's just
a let's meet up for a coffee and you're using your Earth clock, but you happen
to be on the moon, that's going to be absolutely fine. But if
you're trying to do really, really intricate, especially
science or engineering, knowing time is
(06:37):
fundamental, and that's where it becomes really important.
>> Emily Elias (06:40):
We're in this sort of like, moon age
part, duh, I don't know what they're calling it, where all of a sudden, like,
we're going back to the moon, people are, we're doing
experiments on the moon. Again. So, like,
how important does
this 1 second become?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (06:56):
The important thing becomes when you're trying to communicate which
time zone you're in. So imagine you're trying to find
out how far a rock is away from you. And the way you're going to
do that is you're going to fire a laser and you're going to wait for the
return signal, okay? So it's going to go to the rock and then it's going to
bounce off, and then it's going to come back to you. And by we know the speed
of light in a vacuum, the moon's a vacuum. And
(07:16):
by looking at that time difference, we can work out how far
away the rock is. Okay, now, if our
time's wrong, the distance is wrong. So now extend
that idea to, say, docking two spacecraft that are coming
together and we want to fit them together so maybe
astronauts can pass between them. maybe we're getting
samples back, whatever. And so all of a sudden
(07:36):
your time error is translated into a distance
error, which then could be a fundamental flaw in that
docking procedure. So it becomes a really, really
important thing quite quickly.
>> Emily Elias (07:48):
and nobody wants anything to go kaboom. So not a good
time. so how do we then figure out
what time it is on the moon? Is there
somebody who's sitting there trying to
decide? Okay, this
is what moon time is. And everybody should subscribe to
this formula as what moon time is.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (08:08):
So there's been lots of different countries going back to the
moon, right. We've seen chinese space agency go back to the moon.
The UK has had some interactions with going back to the moon,
and the big one that's coming up is the alchemist program, which is an
american program to put humans back on the moon.
And so there's lots of interest. And so it's
actually the Americans. I think when you send people, all of a sudden the
(08:28):
stakes are higher, right. If a
robot explodes, that's non ideal.
If bad things happen to humans, that's absolute disaster.
>> Emily Elias (08:37):
So that's very bad. That is bad.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (08:39):
Absolutely. So they're leading an effort called
coordinated lunar time, or LTC, and they're
trying to come up with a, basically a framework for agreeing
on how time is going to work on the moon. That would
work well for the Americans if they're only dealing with Americans,
right? If you're talking to yourself and you're all agreed on the same time zone, then you're
absolutely fine.
>> Emily Elias (08:57):
It's like if you're in Houston and you're talking to the base
that is on the moon base. And it's those two specific
points that are talking to each other. Other. Easy
breezy.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (09:06):
Right. The trouble is, most of these big projects
aren't done just with one country. There's lots of
interagency coordination, and so
it's going to be getting buy in from the other countries, making sure that
other countries are using the same time zone, so
that we're talking apples and apples and not accidentally
apples and oranges when we talk about time. So I think,
it makes sense that it's coming now. We're doing more and more things
(09:29):
on the moon. The stakes are getting higher and
higher. and so having some form of lunar time
makes sense. And, of course, how that maps onto Earth
time is one of the important parts of this process,
making sure that we have a way of translating lunar
time to universal time, which is what's used
in space. It's equivalent to GMT, but it's
referred to as universal time. And
(09:51):
so, having that mapping is going to be important.
>> Emily Elias (09:53):
Okay, I'm m going to ask, like, a bit of, like, a weird question, but, like,
bear with me. So on the earth, there's,
like, differences in time zones between
England and Canada, right. We've got, like,
hours and hours. Or Australia, it's like 10 hours different,
right. So, like, if you're on the moon
and you're at multiple locations on the
(10:13):
moon, would those multiple locations
have different time zones?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (10:19):
So the reason that we have time zones is because
we coordinate between different people, different objects
within that time zone. Right. So we want to make sure we're all talking the same
language. Whether we really need a time
zone on the moon comes down to how we're using time.
I would argue that for science, we probably don't.
What we actually need to know is what the local time is. So
(10:39):
that really does mean, you know, it's, it's midday
when the sun's overhead in that particular area, because
it's not like we have trains going across the moon, but
we need to know how that does map. So
it's to be decided whether we break these things up
into 24 chunks, and then it's, you know, this bit of
land is, you know, midday. The next one is 01:00
(11:00):
p.m. blah, blah, 02:00 p.m. all the way around until you're back to
midday again. And that obviously then shifts
as the moon rotates or whether we don't
need it, you know? So I think it really depends
on how we're going to be using time
as to whether we really need time zones or
nothing. Traditionally, it's been a way that
it's been useful for the people of a land
(11:23):
to have the same time zone. But if that's not
true on the moon, then do we really need it? And so I think that's
still a bit to be decided.
>> Emily Elias (11:31):
So who decides this, then?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (11:33):
So that's the $64 million question, right. No one
can enforce, as a european, you can't enforce a
japanese space agency to use a convention.
You can only sort of come up with an idea and make
it so good that people want to adopt
it because they see the use, they see that having a
common language is useful. And I think that's the way
(11:53):
it gets adopted. There are some agencies like the
IOU.
>> Emily Elias (11:57):
What's that?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (11:58):
Yes. The IAU is the international astronomical union, and
it kind of a coming together of scientists to
try and come up with a way of governing
how we name things, how we call things, and
how we group things together. So there are some sort of quote
unquote regulations, but that doesn't mean that a specific
country has to adopt it. Right. It's more like a guideline. But I
(12:18):
think in the history of science,
things have been adopted that have been the most useful. Right. We use
maths to describe science because it describes it in such an
elegant way. And I think that, if we can come up with some
form of coordinated lunar time, it will be used because
it's convenient to do so.
>> Emily Elias (12:34):
So there's a massive orbiting
sphere hanging out around us, and
it's only a second different time to us.
It's like, what is happening?
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (12:46):
Well, and, that's because the earth and the moon are, locked. Right. We
only see the same side of the moon. We rotate
at the same, the same rate. And there's lots of good dynamical reasons
why that happens. But if we had a moon that wasn't
doing that, if we had a moon that was tumbling, right. So it's dynamically
just all over the place. It was like, what? Then you
wouldn't see that, right. The time would be really difficult
(13:07):
to measure because if it's moving
in a chaotic way, really, you can't predict what
the time is going to be in, say, four earth
hours. Right. It's going to be too crazy. So the
fact that we're in this sort of locked system means
that actually the time difference isn't too big. But
if you went to some, if you start comparing
(13:27):
to local time on some tumbling asteroids,
then you're then you're in for a bad time. That's going to be really
difficult.
>> Emily Elias (13:35):
I didn't even think of asteroids. this is why you're the
scientist.
>> Dr. Carly Howitt (13:38):
Things are quite nice to think about because mostly the big ones are tidally
locked, so the same face is their parent planet the whole
time. But there are a lot of bodies out there and they
start like, what do you do with comets? You know, comets are
doing their thing. They're going around the sun. It's. They're a whole mess
as well. So there's lots of things to worry about
that are harder than the moon. But starting with the moon is a good
(13:58):
thing because we need it. These decisions are always driven by
necessity, and, we need it for the moon.
>> Emily Elias (14:10):
This podcast was brought to you by Oxford Sparks from the
University of Oxford with music by John Lyons and a
special thanks to Carly Howitt. Tell us what you think about this podcast. We
are on the Internet at ah, Oxfordsparks. Or you can go to our
website, oxfordsparks ox
ac UK. I'm Emily Elias and
I'm not confident what time it is. Bye for now.
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