Telling time on the Moon
A new era of lunar exploration is on the rise, with dozens of Moon missions planned for the coming decade. Europe is in the forefront here, contributing to building the Gateway lunar station and the Orion spacecraft – set to return humans to our natural satellite – as well as developing its large logistic lunar lander, known as Argonaut. As dozens of missions will be operating on and around the Moon and needing to communicate together and fix their positions independently from Earth, this new era will require its own time.
Accordingly, space organisations have started considering how to keep time on the Moon. Having begun with a meeting at ESA’s ESTEC technology centre in the Netherlands last November, the discussion is part of a larger effort to agree a common ‘LunaNet’ architecture covering lunar communication and navigation services.
“LunaNet is a framework of mutually agreed-upon standards, protocols and interface requirements allowing future lunar missions to work together, conceptually similar to what we did on Earth for joint use of GPS and Galileo,” explains Javier Ventura-Traveset, ESA's Moonlight Navigation Manager, coordinating ESA contributions to LunaNet. "Now, in the lunar context, we have the opportunity to agree on our interoperability approach from the very beginning, before the systems are actually implemented.”
