Slashdot Mirror
US DoD Poll On Leap Seconds
@10u8 writes "For time scales to leap, or not to leap, has been the question here before. The ITU-R will be considering leap seconds again in a few weeks. This week the USNO posted a survey about leap seconds by the US DoD. The issue has civil implications as well as technical ones, and there is a demonstrated way to respect the history, remove leaps from navigation and POSIX time, yet keep the sun overhead at noon."
Not surprised, there is really no need to. Your GPSr doesn't care what time it is in human terms, it just needs a number that it can use to caclulate signals relative to each other. That could be anything, possibly even the number of seconds that have passed since 1970.
I would be more surprised if they acutally didupdate GPS satellites with leap second fixes. I would think you would have to recilibrate all the satellites.
*Note* I do office magic, not satellite magic.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
Yeah. an hour is meant to be 1/24 of a day. but unfortunatly, every day has a different length. You can have a look at the length of the days for each day the past 2 years here: http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/
Yep, that means that meanwhile, our clocks are far more precise than the earth rotation itself.
bickerdyke
Around 43,200 years, actually.