at it increases continuously
   throughout the course of the mission. Unfortunately, real spacecraft
   clocks do not always behave so nicely. A clock may reset to a lower
   value, rendering certain counts ambiguous. This might happen if the
   clock has reached its maximum expression, or because of a power surge. A
   clock may also jump ahead.
<P>
 
   Any time one of these discontinuities occurs, we say that SCLK time has
   entered a new partition. The partitions must be accounted for when
   encoding 