Space, time: The continual question If time moves differently on the peaks of mountains than the shores of the ocean, you can imagine that things get even more bizarre the farther away from Earth you travel. kraken tor To add more complication: Time also passes slower the faster a person or spacecraft is moving, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, are lucky, said Dr. Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a phone interview. Though the space station orbits about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, it also travels at high speeds — looping the planet 16 times per day — so the effects of relativity somewhat cancel each other out, Patla said. For that reason, astronauts on the orbiting laboratory can easily use Earth time to stay on schedule. https://kra30c.cc кракен вход For other missions — it’s not so simple. Fortunately, scientists already have decades of experience contending with the complexities. Spacecraft, for example, are equipped with their own clocks called oscillators, Gramling said. “They maintain their own time,” Gramling said. “And most of our operations for spacecraft — even spacecraft that are all the way out at Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt, like New Horizons — (rely on) ground stations that are back on Earth. So everything they’re doing has to correlate with UTC.” But those spacecraft also rely on their own kept time, Gramling said. Vehicles exploring deep into the solar system, for example, have to know — based on their own time scale — when they are approaching a planet in case the spacecraft needs to use that planetary body for navigational purposes, she added. For 50 years, scientists have also been able to observe atomic clocks that are tucked aboard GPS satellites, which orbit Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) away — or about one-nineteenth the distance between our planet and the moon. Studying those clocks has given scientists a great starting point to begin extrapolating further as they set out to establish a new time scale for the moon, Patla said. “We can easily compare (GPS) clocks to clocks on the ground,” Patla said, adding that scientists have found a way to gently slow GPS clocks down, making them tick more in-line with Earth-bound clocks. “Obviously, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s easier than making a mess.”

‘A whole different mindset’ Accurate clockwork is one matter. But how future astronauts living and working on the lunar surface will experience time is a different question entirely. kraken официальный сайт On Earth, our sense of one day is governed by the fact that the planet completes one rotation every 24 hours, giving most locations a consistent cycle of daylight and darkened nights. On the moon, however, the equator receives roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness. “It’s just a very, very different concept” on the moon, Betts said. “And (NASA is) talking about landing astronauts in the very interesting south polar region (of the moon), where you have permanently lit and permanently shadowed areas. So, that’s a whole other set of confusion.” https://kra30c.cc kraken зайти “It’ll be challenging” for those astronauts, Betts added. “It’s so different than Earth, and it’s just a whole different mindset.” That will be true no matter what time is displayed on the astronauts’ watches. Still, precision timekeeping matters — not just for the sake of scientifically understanding the passage of time on the moon but also for setting up all the infrastructure necessary to carry out missions. The beauty of creating a time scale from scratch, Gramling said, is that scientists can take everything they have learned about timekeeping on Earth and apply it to a new system on the moon. And if scientists can get it right on the moon, she added, they can get it right later down the road if NASA fulfills its goal of sending astronauts deeper into the solar system. “We are very much looking at executing this on the moon, learning what we can learn,” Gramling said, “so that we are prepared to do the same thing on Mars or other future bodies.”