Interferometry super-session to be held for IYA2009

9 November 2009

The International VLBI Service for geodesy and astrometry (IVS) is organising an ambitious event in the framework of IYA2009. The IVS runs a worldwide network of radio telescopes dedicated to monitoring the Earth's rotation and establishing celestial and terrestrial reference frames. The VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) technique connects all antennas together, creating the equivalent of an Earth-size radio telescope which allows one to map the targets (extragalactic radio sources) with milliarcsecond angular resolution and measure their astrometric positions to about 0.1 milliarcsecond or even better.

On 18-19 November 2009, the IVS will run a 24-hour "super-session" as an IYA2009 event. This will be unique in several respects:

1) it will be the largest VLBI session ever run (> 30 VLBI radio telescopes will participate);

2) it will observe all the 295 sources comprised in the second realisation of the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF2), the new celestial reference frame recently adopted by the IAU (Rio de Janeiro 2009), thereby serving as a kickoff session for the monitoring of this new frame. It is also "a first" in this respect, since observing that many sources at once (in a single VLBI session) has never happened before;

3) this super-session will be accompanied by open door/outreach at the sites of the radio telescopes that participate in the session.

For more information, please visit: http://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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