What they're actually being told to build is "write down the rules for moon time", which is basically what you said but defined in terms of "this much faster than earth time", and a system doing the same thing on other planets or places in the solar system.

So it's less a timezone and more a time system, and instructions for how you calibrate your atomic clock on the moon and reconcile the difference with terrestrial clocks.

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Serious question....why would an entirely isolated GPS constellation need to have "a time zone" as opposed to it's own epoch (like unix)? It's on the receiver side that all the computation happens, aren't the satellites essentially just announcing an agreed-upon time? Wouldn't the client be able to do it's own comparison of "it's time", as long as it's source of time is also synchronized with the constellation?

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 months ago

I believe, and we're at the edge of my understanding here, that the satellites need a consistent adjustment for local relativity. Because the satellites also have their clocks tick differently.
So they define a new time standard for the moon so that lunar operations can function based on that time standard, rather than having to recalculate relative to earth.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11150

That's the paper from NIST that's basically the timezone part of it all.
They're basically defining how to calibrate moon clocks so we all agree exactly how they differ from earth clocks.