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China's space programme
ChinaScience

Chinese scientists propose ‘religion-free’ calendar for the space age

  • Earth-centric standards create challenges for measuring time on other planets, according to researchers
  • They suggest a mechanism that marks the ‘beginning of time’ from a pulsar signal

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A new timekeeping standard is necessary as humans venture beyond Earth, according to Chinese scientists. Photo: Shutterstock
Ling Xin
Chinese space scientists have proposed a universal standard for keeping time across the solar system that, unlike existing systems, does not put the Earth – or religion – at its centre.

A new standard has become necessary as humans have ventured into space, according to their paper published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation last month.

Although timekeeping is often taken for granted on Earth, it is a major challenge in outer space. It is impossible to determine the exact time on Mars by syncing it with the time on Earth because it takes 3 to 22 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Earth to Mars, and the relative position and velocity of the two planets are constantly changing, according to the paper.

To develop a timekeeping mechanism that works beyond Earth, the authors proposed using the solar system’s common centre of mass, or its “barycentre”, as the origin of coordinates to determine locations in space.
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The beginning of time could then be defined as the moment a chosen signal from a millisecond pulsar – a highly magnetic neutron star that pulses hundreds of times per second – reached the barycentre, they said.

This is dramatically different from how people tell time now, with our home planet at the centre of the coordinate system and the Greenwich meridian as the reference point. Meanwhile, year 0 in the widely used Gregorian calendar is determined by the purported birth year of Jesus Christ.

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“The starting point of time used by the Gregorian calendar that is generally used now is related to religion,” said the researchers, who hold senior positions in the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the China Academy of Space Technology, and the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.

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