National
Institute of Standards and Technology has officially launched a new
atomic clock, called NIST-F2, to serve as a new US civilian time and
frequency standard, along with the current NIST-F1 standard. NIST-F2
would neither gain nor lose one second in about 300 million years,
making it about three times as accurate as NIST-F1, which has served as
the standard since 1999. Both clocks use a 'fountain' of cesium atoms to
determine the exact length of a second.
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