Opinions Sought on UTC Redefinition

After years of discussions, a proposal to fundamentally redefine Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) will come to a conclusive vote in January 2012 at the ITU-R in Geneva, Switzerland. This proposal would halt the intercalary adjustments known as leap seconds that maintain UTC as a form of Universal Time. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has issued a questionnaire to accompany this transition. Deadline for responses is 31st August 2011.

 

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 Universal Time (UT1). Such applications would require a separate access to UT1, such as through the publication of DUT1 by other means. GPS satellites and receivers make use of this time for their calculations.

 

The survey aims to find out how strong the opinions are for maintaining or changing the present system.