At 8 p.m. ET on June 30, time will pause for only a moment in what is known as a "leap second," the first one the Earth has experienced in decades.
Explaining the leap second in a news release, NASA scientists said the Atomic Clock will add a second on June 30 to make up for the Earth's slowing orbit. Luckily for its inhabitants, the planet's orbit is slowing at an incredibly slow rate.
"Earth's rotation is gradually slowing down a bit, so leap seconds are a way to account for that," Daniel MacMillan, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in the release.
In Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), or "atomic time," June 30's time will go from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 rather than resetting to zero.
"The next-generation system is designed to meet the needs of the most demanding scientific applications now and in the near future," Stephen Merkowitz, project manager for the Space Geodesy at Goddard, said in the release.
The last leap second occurred in 1972, but given how much time has been in between them, they are not exactly predictable.
"In the short term, leap seconds are not as predictable as everyone would like," Chopo Ma, a geophysicist at Goddard and a member of the directing board of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, said in the release. "The modeling of the Earth predicts that more and more leap seconds will be called for in the long-term, but we can't say that one will be needed every year."
