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power failure on one key atomic clock The feature caused U.S. official time to slip by just under five millionths of a second last week, the country’s time watchdog said.
On December 17, a severe storm caused a power outage at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Denver laboratory, and a backup generator subsequently failed. disrupting the system Important to maintain time standard.
Official times are calculated as a weighted average NIST’s 16 Atomic clocks, which use the natural resonant frequencies of atoms to tell time with extremely high accuracy.
NIST spokeswoman Rebecca Jacobson said in a public email that the power disruption resulted in the NIST universal coordinate time slowing down by 4.8 microseconds.
For comparison, it takes about 350,000 microseconds for a person to blink.
This was only a small deviation in the reference time scale maintained by NIST, which said it immediately informed organizations to refer to other sources.
Battery backup kept the individual atomic clocks running uninterrupted, but disrupted coordination between the clocks and systems that measure and transmit official time.
NIST said it was quick to restore backup power by activating diesel generators held in reserve at the facility.
“We have acquired some monitoring capability, which shows that the transmitted UTC signal did not deviate by more than 5 us (five millionths of a second) and appeared stable,” Ms. Jacobson said in an email.
Although this deviation was much smaller than would be noticed by most organizations, it could matter for some “high-level” systems dependent on extremely precise timing, such as GPS and satellite navigation, telecommunications networks, and high-frequency financial trading.
“Such accuracy is critical for scientific applications, telecommunications, critical infrastructure, and integrity monitoring of positioning systems,” NIST group leader Jeff Sherman said in an email.
“However, the most popular method based on common-view time transfer using GPS satellites as ‘transfer standards’ has seamlessly transitioned to using clocks at NIST’s Ft. Collins campus as a reference standard.”
This feature has reduced the impact on many users of high-precision timing signals, Mr. Sherman said.