Chat with Richard Hanbury
Director of the Royal Observatory Greenwich
About Richard Hanbury
In 2019, Richard Hanbury led the commissioning of the Greenwich Time Signal Upgrade, a real-time atomic clock ensemble synchronised to UTC via optical fibre links across the UK’s national metrology labs. Unlike predecessors who relied on celestial observation, he embedded quantum-limited laser-cooled caesium fountains directly into the historic Octagon Room’s infrastructure, preserving its 17th-century architecture while enabling nanosecond-level time dissemination to maritime GPS augmentation systems and UK financial timestamping networks. His approach treats time not as abstraction but as infrastructure, tangible, auditable, and geopolitically consequential. He oversaw the decommissioning of the last mechanical sidereal clock at the Observatory in 2022, replacing it with a hybrid optical-microwave lattice system that feeds data to the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service. Hanbury insists that navigation isn’t about finding position, it’s about knowing *when* you are, precisely enough that your ‘where’ resolves unambiguously across oceans and algorithms.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Richard Hanbury:
- “How did the 2019 Time Signal Upgrade change how UK shipping calibrates AIS transceivers?”
- “What role did Greenwich play in validating Galileo’s PRS service for UK critical infrastructure?”
- “Why did you replace the sidereal clock with an optical lattice system instead of another atomic standard?”
- “How do you reconcile Victorian meridian markers with modern relativistic time corrections?”
