************************************************************************ IERS Message No. 192 July 12, 2011 ************************************************************************ Questionnaire to survey opinion concerning a redefinition of UTC After years of discussions, a proposal to fundamentally redefine UTC will come to a conclusive vote in January 2012 at the ITU-R in Geneva. This proposal would halt the intercalary adjustments known as leap seconds that maintain UTC as a form of Universal Time. 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 UT1. Such applications would require a separate access to UT1, such as through the publication of DUT1 by other means. The objective of the survey is to find out the strength of opinion for maintaining or changing the present system. Link to the questionnaire: http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/index.php?index=questionnaire Your response is appreciated before 31 August 2011. Daniel Gambis Earth Orientation Center of the IERS ************************************************************************ IERS Messages are edited and distributed by the IERS Central Bureau. To submit texts for distribution and to subscribe or unsubscribe, please write to <central_bureau@iers.org>. Archives: http://www.iers.org/Messages/ ************************************************************************