[N19PEDL2]

> because Russia needed time to update glonass satellites.

Why is this? As leap seconds don’t occur on a regular frequency, I assume they are not hardcoded on the software or hardware on board, but the control centre uploads them on the satellites enough in advance once they have been scheduled. So why can’t the control centre just stop sending those updates?

[_alternator_]

My understanding the problem is that GLONASS is aware of leap seconds at all. It sends messages in UTC, which has this leap second funny business. GPS uses a special "GPS time" (sometimes abbreviated UT) that doesn't have a leap second. For further confusion, the leap second ensures that UTC is never more than 0.9 seconds off of mean solar time, aka UT1.

This type of assumption that was made early in a massive software and hardware project that's now been ossified for ~50 years is going to be hard to change.