3 ms·

Because of the need to convert between the two systems. It's not just about keeping time on the moon. It's reconciling that with other places in the solar syst

• yencabulator 4y ago
  If they run on UTC, and correct for drift like any clock needs to do, what else is there? What conversion, what two systems?
  • adastra22 4y ago
    Clock slew is unacceptable for many use cases. For keeping system time on a UNIX server or for astronaut watches, sure. For many other things you need a precise and accurate count of how many micro/nano/pico seconds have passed. You can’t just have one second suddenly be N nanoseconds longer and expect sensitive experiments to not be affected.
    • yencabulator 4y ago
      If you're just talking about measuring e.g. the duration of an experiment, you don't need to sync to TAI for that. For matching with TAI timestamps, no two atomic clocks agree with each other exactly anyway -- TAI is an average of some 500 atomic clocks. If you care to that level, you have to correct for your elevation on Earth already. So no matter what you do, if you care enough, you'll end up with some correction factor. For most practical uses, you don't use an atomic clock, just a good steady oscillator, apply a correction factor to its output if you want to match with some other clock source (convert to TAI, etc), and use feedback like NTP to keep your clock on time. The biggest difference between moon and Earth in that is the latency to authoritative clock.