On 2023-12-22 22:35, Seaman, Robert Lewis - (rseaman) wrote:
E pur si muove
Natura non facit saltus -- why should UTC?
UTC may no longer serve as a kind of solar time (after 2026 or 2035, or
somebody said 2040 the other day), but civil time will continue to have
engineering requirements tracing to both solar and atomic time scales.
As far as required by local civil time scales, continuous UTC can
stand for solar
time (UT1 up to 15 min) for several centuries.
Current positioning applications on the surface of the Earth cannot
be performed
without knowledge of UT1 up several milliseconds. These applications
work in
wrist watches today and they do not need nor exploit the leap
seconds of UTC.
What type of engineering requirements can be satisfied with the
current UTC with
leap seconds that fail when UTC becomes continuous? The Russians
have required
more time for updates in satellite software, they have not said that it
cannot be done.
Michael Deckers.
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