[LEAPSECS] Leap second mess at NASA

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 2 Jun 2011 at 6:12, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/leapseconds_requirements.html

> 

> In particular section 3.3


That document has bogosity from its very first sentence where it says 
"Current CDF_Epoch time scheme is nominally continuous Gregorian time 
from 0AD"... unfortunately for them, there wasn't actually any such 
year as "0 AD", since the real years went straight from 1 BC to AD 1.

The remainder of the document describes a whole crazy quilt of time 
scales and standards used by various things, for which leap seconds 
are only one of the many things that are subject to variation.

One of the devices mentioned has weekly clock-drift adjustments of up 
to 15 milliseconds (actually a pretty accurate clock compared to most 
non-atomic timepieces), so it seems they have to do leaps of sorts 
even without any leap seconds in the mix.

And don't they have a Martian solar time scale they use on Mars 
missions?

-- 
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/