[tz] Sol 5000 for Opportunity

[Steve Allen]

On Sun 2018-02-18T00:08:25-0700 Brian Inglis hath writ:
> Pretty presumptuous of the IAU to use Universal: they /should/ know better.

Alas, Universal Time of 1928 is a subdivision of the already approved
Universal Day, and that derives from the Victorian-era knowledge of
astronomy and speech patterns of the 1884 International Meridian
Conference.  Of regrettable things left over from time-keeping
history, that is not the worst, and the Germans did explicitly avoid
it by choosing Weltzeit as their term.

If Mars denizens decide to choose a single legal time scale that is
constructed from an amalgam of precision time and planetary rotation
then it will also need leaps of some sort.  Hopefully they will avoid
the attempt to bend a pre-existing time distribution system into doing
two different time scales, and simply distribute their calendar days
as one of several polynomial offsets from their underlying precision
time and frequency distribution system.

--
Steve Allen                    <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
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