I wisely avoided contributing the last few days' debate. Ken Seidelmann, John Seago, and I have been working to overcome the deficiencies in the process used to formulate the "new" ITU-R recommendation. As we said in our paper last summer, the goals are to assure that major stakeholders are included in consensus, to develop normative guidance for accommodating leap seconds should they be retained or work without them if they are deprecated, and to define in a normative sense the different flavors of seconds, minutes, weeks, etc. The guidance should include how to handle DUT greater than 0.9 seconds and what the reasonable predictive time span should be for inserting leap seconds. These I have gleaned from your exchanges are your major concerns and ideas.
How are we pursuing this? We are using my authority within ISO. Several ISO technical committees are affected: ISO/TC154 (Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration, ISO/TC12 Units and Measurement, and ISO TC37 Terminology as well as JTC-1. The terminology folks are already working on whether a time scale unconnected with astronomical events should include the term "universal." I bring this to your attention to solicit your participation in resolving this long-standing issue. There will be meetings in various places, most often in Geneva. Changing the subject, the comments on geodetic references are very relevant. There is nothing like the leap second issue, but WGS-84 is not used world-wide. There are discrepancies in maps of Korea, for instance. WGS-84 is also out of date relative to the continuing examination of the geopotential such as the GRACE mission. As you all know, Earth orientation and time are not independent. Correlating EOP with real time observations in order to infer current orbits precisely enough for assessing conjunctions among satellite is very important. Dave Finkleman Senior Scientist Center for Space Standards and Innovation Analytical Graphics, Inc. 7150 Campus Drive Colorado Springs, CO 80920 Phone: 719-510-8282 or 719-321-4780 Fax: 719-573-9079 Discover CSSI data downloads, technical webinars, publications, and outreach events at www.CenterForSpace.com. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs