IERS Message No. 192: Questionnaire to survey opinion concerning a redefinition of UTC

[central_bureau at iers.org]

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IERS Message No. 192                                       July 12, 2011
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Questionnaire to survey opinion concerning a redefinition of UTC


After years of discussions, a proposal to fundamentally redefine UTC
will come to a conclusive vote in January 2012 at the ITU-R in Geneva.
This proposal would halt the intercalary adjustments known as leap
seconds that maintain UTC as a form of Universal Time.

If the proposal is approved, UTC would not keep pace with Earth rotation
and the value of DUT1 would become unconstrained. Therefore UTC would no
longer be directly useful for various technical applications which rely
on it being less than 1 second from UT1. Such applications would require
a separate access to UT1, such as through the publication of DUT1 by
other means.

The objective of the survey is to find out the strength of opinion for
maintaining or changing the present system.

Link to the questionnaire:

http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/index.php?index=questionnaire

Your response is appreciated before 31 August 2011.

Daniel Gambis
Earth Orientation Center of the IERS


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