Comments on Recommendation III of the IAU Working Group on Reference Systems

Extract

IAU Recommendations should 1) help to avoid confusion and 2) help to enhance scientific capability. Recommendation III does neither. It would create confusion while doing nothing to improve scientific results.

If Recommendation III is ever implemented, the result will be sheer chaos. This recommendation proposes that the rate of the basic ephemeris time scale be changed – by an amount of nearly one-half second per year. This implies that all existing planetary, lunar, satellite, spacecraft, asteroid and comet ephemerides would be referenced to an obsolete time scale; all existing sets of orbital elements would need a modification; that epoch J2000 (JED 2451545.0) would differ from the presently defined one by nearly 15 seconds.