How Should Space Settlers Keep Track of Time?
Space settlers establishing bases further afield might adopt Earth time and calendars while starting up a new society, but as time goes on, they might want a more permanent solution tailored to their lives. Gangale said he originally entertained the idea of synchronizing Mars months to the movement of its moons, the way Earth’s months are tied to the moon’s 27-day orbit, but it wasn’t practical: Phobos orbits Mars three times a day, and Deimos completes its orbit once every 30 hours—“much too short to use as a basis for dividing the year into usable fractions,” says Gangale. For settlers staying closer to home, nonprofit group LunarClock.org advocates for Lunar Standard Time and the Lunar Calendar, where a year consists of 12 “days” (comparable to Earth months), each named for a person who has walked on the moon, broken up into 30 “cycles” (comparable to Earth days) of 24 moon-hours.
Source: slate.com