CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —The European Space Agency wants to establish a separate time zone for the moon because there are more lunar missions planned than ever before.

This week, the agency said space organizations around the world are considering how to best keep time on the moon. According to Pietro Giordano, a navigation system engineer for the space agency, the idea was brought up at a meeting in the Netherlands towards the end of last year, where participants agreed on the urgent need to establish "a common lunar reference time."

Giordano stated in a statement that "a joint international effort is now being launched towards accomplishing this."

A moon mission currently follows the time zone of the nation that is in charge of the spacecraft. According to European space officials, everyone would benefit from having a universally recognized lunar time zone, especially as more nations and even private companies aim for the moon and NASA prepares to send astronauts there.

Fast approaching the 25th anniversary of the launch of its first component, NASA was forced to consider the issue of time while designing and constructing the International Space Station.

The space station operates on Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which is meticulously based on atomic clocks, despite not having its own time zone. The time difference between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the other cooperating space programs in Russia, Japan, and Europe is thus more evenly distributed.

According to the European Space Agency, the international team studying lunar time is debating whether one organization should establish and maintain time on the moon.

You should also think about the technical issues. According to the space agency, clocks on the moon run 56 microseconds faster than those on Earth. Ticking behaves differently on the lunar surface than it does in lunar orbit, which further complicates matters.

Bernhard Hufenbach of the space agency pointed out that perhaps the most crucial requirement for lunar time will be that it be useful for astronauts there. NASA hopes to send astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years in 2024, with a possible lunar landing as early as 2025.

With each day lasting up to 29.5 Earth days, Hufenbach said in a statement that "this will be quite a challenge." But now that we have a working time system for the moon, we can apply it to other planetary locations.