An equatorial launch location gives a rocket a boost from the Earth's rotation, meaning it can lift heavier payloads into orbit.

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Use a photographic plate to record an image from a zenith-pointing telescope, and you will end up with a streaky image, as a result of the earth's rotation.

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By the time any change occurred, humans might even have generated technology that could speed up the Earth's rotation or transport us to other liveable planets within our galaxy.

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Use a digital sensor, however, and it is possible to shuffle the image across the sensor in such a way that it is exactly in step with the earth's rotation.

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"Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth's rotation, " Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said while explaining the phenomenon in 2005.

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Over a few decades this would amount to a minute's difference, but over several hundred years this would mean the atomic clock time-scale and the time-scale based on the Earth's rotation would be out by an hour.

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"Countries could just accommodate the divergence by not putting their clocks forward in the spring, so you'd change your time zone by one hour to bring civil time back into line with the Earth's rotation, " added Dr Whibberley.

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By launching closer to the equator, the rocket receives a bigger boost from the Earth's rotation, meaning it can lift nearly double the mass of a normal Baikonur payload - a maximum of three tonnes, as opposed to 1.7 tonnes, into a geosynchronous orbit 36, 000km above the Earth.

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