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Moon GPS Is Coming
Nations and companies are ramping up their efforts to deploy the first satnav on the moon to support a flurry of planned missions there.
“There hasn’t been a thrust to translate all the communication and navigation infrastructure that exists on Earth to anywhere else in the solar system—until now,” says Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who has published research into the logistics of these efforts. This leap is propelled by a surge of planned activity and exploration on the moon in the coming years that will demand sophisticated logistics, including the type of position, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems that underpin practically all of our infrastructure on Earth. The new work by Patla and Ashby has laid the foundation for a standard lunar timescale, similar to UTC on Earth, which will allow future orbital and ground nodes on the moon to ping out synchronized timestamps needed for precision PNT services.
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