At the bottom of the articles are some anticipated highlights of the coming year. One of them is a new Russian launch facility in Guiana. It says that just by moving a launch to the equator the Russians will improve the efficiency of the Sooyuz rocket by 50%.
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I was looking at something on the Web and there was a like to a definition of Universal Time. I followed the cascade of links and ended up at the U.S. Naval Observatory where I learned the difference between UTC and plain old UT. These are slightly different flavors of the same thing.
Universal Time (UT), commonly referred to as Greenwich Mean Time and abbreviated as either UT, UT1, or Z (zulu time), is determined by observing how long it takes a star to reach the same place in the sky on successive nights. This time may vary slightly from the time kept by your watch but is good enough for government work or when your accuracy doesn't need to be good to the second. So that is good for things like the time of the Full Moon or the meridional passage of the GRS. This is the time listed in almanacs.
If you need accuracy of a second or better, say for timing a occultation or launching a satellite you want to loose on the back side of Mars, then you need to use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is a civil time that is based on averaging the results of a network of worldwide atomic clocks. This is the time broadcast by WWV and supplied to the internet.
I know there is more information on this topei in the Observer's Handbook but the information there is so dense that I have never made it through that article.
