It's About Time

We were down south driving, years ago, at the magical intersection where Georgia becomes Alabama, and the time zone changes from Eastern to Central. Without me telling it to do so, my phone changed its time display, rolling it back an hour and playing Roll Tide Roll as a welcoming song.  This magic, from a phone that can't stop taking calls from UNKNOWN CALLER and texts from deposed Nigerian princes. 

But it's vital to know where you are and what time it is where you are, and even though most of us don't even think about this, the moon needs its own time zone, or what Pietro Giordano of the European Space Agency calls "a common lunar reference time."

This is key for keeping astronauts and their family synched up. Imagine the confusion when someone calls home from the moon and gets no answer because their spouse is out picking up the kids from soccer practice.

So, late last year, so that we can all be on the same page, a meeting was held in the Netherlands so that participating nations could agree about what time it is on the moon.

 “A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this,” Giordano said in a statement.

"Launched."  Get it?

As of now, moon missions keep time by what time it is in their home country, but Europeans say that an internationally accepted lunar time zone would make it easy for everyone on Earth to set their watches to moon time.  

And as the International Space Station sails on and on, our NASA had to deal with the time piece and have the space station on Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. That is a time system based on atomic clocks, which are even more dependable than Maytag washing machines. 

While I am happy that missions to the moon will have a time everyone can understand, I'm curious about this: linguistic sticklers insist on saying "Earth," and not "the Earth." But they say "the Moon," and not "Moon."

I think it's time we settle that.