[LEAPSECS] CCTF reported to CIPM last month and it's interesting!

[Seaman, Robert Lewis - (rseaman)]

I said:

> One hopes that funding and motivation to maintain and enhance UT1 will remain indefinitely.
> It is only a piece of the puzzle.

Somebody responded off list that I’ve “jumped the shark”.

I’m not sure if the implication is that international organizations will, of course, continue to support UT1 forever and ever? Who will fund this, and why should they, if they believe the concept of Earth rotation itself has jumped the shark? “Geophysics" might have seemed a sufficient response before attempts this year to defund other basic and applied science. Heck, I’ve been approached by a flat Earther inside the Lunar and Planetary Lab.

The one attempt I’m aware of to distribute UT1 via NTP was unusable. Monthly bulletins do not address all use cases. If issuing an occasional leap second was considered too onerous, what about maintaining a perpetual UT1 clock at multiple institutions and providing world-wide access?

We intentionally had proceedings for the 2011 and 2013 futureofutc.org workshops to provide context for future discussions. None of those papers has become obsolete just because techno-bureaucrats have decided to redefine UTC. I stopped focusing on leap seconds per se about 15 years ago. Absolutely nothing has happened more recently to change the fundamental issues.

Some timekeeping use cases derive from atomic time standards and some from solar time standards. (And some from both.) How is this either a radical statement or an obsolete one?

My more recent timekeeping responsibilities are described here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01370. The near-Earth asteroid survey I work for can largely ignore leap seconds since Meinberg implemented their support correctly, and we keep current with updates. But as UTC drifts from UT1, orbit computers for near-Earth asteroids will definitely need to get their signs and software right.

Rob Seaman
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory

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