In advance of hurricane force winds moving into Colorado earlier this week, Xcel Energy preemptively shut off power to protect areas of the state from extreme fire danger. But due to the outage, time (very) briefly stood still at the NIST Internet Time Service facility in Boulder.
Boulder’s NIST F-4 atomic clock uses cesium atoms to measure the exact length of a second. These tools are used for many things, including GPS systems, data centers, scientific research, telecommunications, power generation and other systems that require ultra-precise timekeeping.
According to NIST, “NIST-F4 measures an unchanging frequency in the heart of cesium atoms, the internationally agreed-upon basis for defining the second since 1967. The clock is based on a ‘fountain’ design that represents the gold standard of accuracy in timekeeping. NIST-F4 ticks at such a steady rate that if it had started running 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed, it would be off by less than a second today.”…