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Michael Bradley

@dgoldsmith Given that UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time (at least in English), it seems like it's in need of a renaming. Perhaps Coordinated Terrestrial Time?

I wonder if this will continue for other important celestial bodies? I wouldn't be surprised if at least Mars got its own time standard codified. Wikipedia mentions an "MTC", but only as a "proposed" standard based on Mars's orbit instead of atomic clocks.

4 comments
Michael Bradley

@dgoldsmith Although it feels a little impractical to keep creating new standards for every celestial body we visit, perhaps we need a new standard somehow independent of general relativity... how about "Stardate"? 🖖

Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

@michaelbradley I don't think we're going to be visiting that many celestial bodies, so I'm not worried about that.

You still need to define the relationship between the various time standards. UTC is basically "stardate" already; LTC will be defined relative to UTC.

pglpm

@michaelbradley @dgoldsmith
There is such a time (obviously based on general relativity), at least for the whole Solar System neighbourhood. It's called Barycentric Coordinate Time (TCB). A good paper to read about these standard times is Petit's geodesy.unr.edu/hanspeterplag/

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