Together with researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we are publishing joint research exploring the feasibility of a lunar laser system: an ultra-stable, cryogenic optical clock on the Moon designed to serve as foundational timekeeping and navigation infrastructure for future lunar operations.

The concept, which we call the Lunar Super-Laser, would place a cryogenic optical laser inside a permanently shadowed crater near one of the Moon's poles. Those regions are among the most thermally stable environments in the Solar System, never warmed by sunlight and insulated by the Moon's lack of atmosphere, offering the conditions required to achieve a frequency precision the research team believes would surpass anything currently possible on Earth.

As NASA's Artemis program pushes toward a sustained lunar presence and commercial operators begin building out habitats and robotic systems, reliable timekeeping independent of Earth is becoming a real operational requirement. Both NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy have flagged the absence of a lunar time standard as a critical gap — one this research aims to help address.