HR 8837 Introduced
Celestial Time
Back in June, Rep McClellan (D,VA) introduced HR 8837, the Celestial Time Standardization Act. The bill would require NASA to enable “the development of celestial time standardization”. No new funding is authorized by this bill.
Definitions
There are no definitions in this bill.
This would have been a good place to define the term ‘time dilation’ which is the root of the problem that the bill is trying to ‘correct’. This term is tied to the effects of the good-old E=mc2 equation. One of the consequences of that equation is that the closer one gets to the speed of light (the ‘c’ in the equation) the slower that time progresses. There is an interesting ‘time dilation’ calculator here that allows you to play with this concept. The problem is that all engineering and science time-based standards are based upon constants related to the speed of the Earth moving around the Sun. The Moon has a separate velocity due to its revolving around the Earth (1,022 km/sec). Plugging that number into the ‘calculator’ (after converting it to a percent of the speed of light, .00034%) time is only passing 99.999999999422% as fast as it is here on Earth. That is not noticeable to us poor humans, but it could have an impact on scientific measurements and calculations, as well as on electronic control system interoperability.
This did not have much of an impact during the Apollo missions because of less sophisticated computers in use then. It will get more important as more devices are on the Moon (and orbiting the Moon) communicating with each other and the Earth.
Celestial Time
Section 2 of this relatively short bill starts out with a ‘sense of Congress’ statement that only addresses the time dilation issue in passing; the “relativistic effects” statement in §2(a)(3). That ‘sense’ concludes by noting: “development of such standardization will advance United States leadership in standards setting for global competitiveness, and will benefit other spacefaring countries and entities.”
Subsection 2(b) sets forth the celestial time development requirements, directing NASA to:
Enable the development of celestial time standardization, including by leading the study and definition of a coordinated lunar time, and
Develop a strategy to implement a coordinated lunar time that would support future operations and infrastructure on and around the Moon.
It would further require NASA to incorporate the following features of a coordinated lunar time strategy:
Traceability to Coordinated Universal Time,
Accuracy sufficient to support precision navigation and science,
Resilience to loss of contact with Earth, and
Scalability to space environments beyond the Earth-Moon system.
Moving Forward
McClellan is a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that there may be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. I see nothing in this bill that would engender any specific opposition. I suspect that the bill would have substantial bipartisan support within the Committee. The main problem this bill will face in moving forward is the relative lack of space-geeky support in the House leadership that would be required to move the bill to the floor of the House.