Why scientists say we need to send clocks to the moon

&gt; On the lunar surface, a single Earth day would be roughly 56 microseconds shorter than on our home planet — a tiny number that can lead to significant inconsistencies over time.<p>Given that there are 86,400,000,000 microseconds in a day, we will need a leap year every 1.5 billion years to stay in sync. I think we’ll be fine.

&gt; <i>A network of clocks on the moon could work in concert to inform the new lunar time scale, just as atomic clocks do for UTC on Earth.</i><p>Presumably some clocks would have to be on the surface of Luna facing Earth&#x2F;Terra, and some clocks on the side facing away, so that the gravity well of the planet could be averaged out.<p>And if we&#x27;re going to go through the trouble&#x2F;expense of sending some gear, it might be useful to pack multiple instruments: if timekeeping is a long-term need, another long-term instrument could perhaps be a seismograph to measure for possible &#x27;moonquakes&#x27;. Multiple clocks could mean multiple seismographs for better triangulation of events.

Idk. Is this actually needed in practice? Most RTC chips are off by several seconds per day. If you need accurate time you sync them to an outside source (a network time server or GPS). Does it matter if your oscillator is 56 microseconds off because of relativistic effects if it is off by multiple seconds because the chip is cheap?<p>You need some sort of network connections back to Earth anyway, can&#x27;t you just spare a few NTP packets here and there and be done with it?<p>I haven&#x27;t read the underlying white paper yet and maybe that will change my mind, but the CNN article hasn&#x27;t convinced me yet that this is a problem worth worrying about.

&quot;Private moon lander will carry Nokia&#x27;s 4G cell network to the lunar surface this year&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;nokia-4g-cell-network-on-the-moon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;nokia-4g-cell-network-on-the-moon</a><p>Doesn&#x27;t 4G include a time synchronization service for receivers with no GPS; and is the SI second unit (which is currently defined in terms of the cesium decay) const hardcoded in the new system?

&gt; Seconds tick by ever so slightly faster atop a mountain than they do in the valleys of Earth.<p>Did they push an update with new laws of physics, or have I completely missed something?