Geodesy by radio interferometry: Intercontinental distance determinations with subdecimeter precision

Herring, Thomas A.; Corey, B. E.; Counselman, C. C.; Shapiro, I. I.; Ronnang, B. O.; Rydbeck, O. E. H.; Clark, T. A.; Coates, R. J.; Ma, C.; Ryan, James W.; Vandenberg, N. R.; Hinteregger, H. F.; Knight, C. A.; Rogers, A. E. E.; Whitney, A. R.; Robertson, D. S.; Schupler, B. R.

doi:10.1029/jb086ib03p01647

Cited by 32 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…This would seem to indicate that to within the noise of the measurements there has been no motion across this trans-continental baseline in about four years. The value for the Haystaek-Onsala baseline is about 12 cm different from the value published in Herring et al (1981) which is based on data taken in 1977 and 1978. Although this difference is more than four times the formal standard error quoted, it is also within the scatter quoted for separate solutions which were constructed from subsets of the data.…”

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confidence: 47%

Earth Rotation Information Derived from Merit and Polaris VLBI Observations

Robertson

1981

International Astronomical Union Colloquium

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In September and October 1980, the National Geodetic Survey, jointly with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and several other agencies and institutions, conducted a series of astronomical radio interferometry (VLBI) observing sessions to support the IAU/IUGG MERIT short campaign. A total of 14 days of observations, organized into two 7-day sessions, was collected by three observatories in the United States (Harvard Radio Astronomy Station (HRAS), Haystack Observatory, and Owens Valley Radio Observatory) and the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden. Chilbolton Observatory, England, and Effelsberg Observatory, West Germany, also participated on some days. Immediately following the MERIT campaign, NGS initiated a series of 24-hour observing sessions, spaced at approximately 2-week intervals, as a pilot program to project POLARIS. All of these sessions included two observatories, HRAS and Haystack, and Onsala participated in about half of the sessions. The MERIT and POLARIS observations were made with the third generation MARK III VLBI system using procedures and schedules designed to yield high quality geodetic information, including Earth rotation values. This paper briefly traces the planning, observing, and data processing activities, and presents the Earth rotation information thus far derived from the data.

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confidence: 47%

Earth Rotation Information Derived from Merit and Polaris VLBI Observations

Robertson

1981

International Astronomical Union Colloquium

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“…The primary purpose of this paper is to present baseline vector, earth rotation, and earth tide results obtained from an analysis of VLBI experiments conducted by our group with the Mark I system between April 1972 and May 1978. Some results from these experiments have already been published [Shapiro et al, 1974;Robertson, 1975;Rogers et al, 1978;Ryan et al, 1978;Ma, 1978;Robertson et al, 1979;Herring et al, 1981-] (see, also, Hinteregger et al [1972]); we will refer to these publications for much of the relevant information concerning the experiments and their analysis. The results from this paper supersede those from earlier papers because this one utilizes the ensemble of Mark I data and attempts to account more realistically for the errors caused by the ionosphere.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geodesy by radio interferometry: Determinations of baseline vector, Earth rotation, and solid earth tide parameters with the Mark I Very Long Baseline Radio Interferometry System

Ryan¹,

Clark²,

Coates³

et al. 1986

J. Geophys. Res.

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We analyzed 37 very long baseline radio interferometry experiments performed between 1972 and 1978 and derived estimates of baseline vectors between six sites, five in the continental United States and one in Europe. We found no evidence of significant changes in baseline length. For example, with a statistical level of confidence of approximately 85%, upper bounds on such changes within the United States ranged from a low of 10 mm/yr for the 850 km baseline between Westford, Massachusetts, and Green Bank, West Virginia, to a high of 90 mm/yr for the nearly 4000 km baseline between Westford and Goldstone, California. We also obtained estimates for universal time and for the x component of the position of the earth's pole. For the last 15 experiments, the only ones employing wideband receivers, the root‐mean‐square differences between our values and the corresponding ones published by the Bureau International de l'Heure are 0.0012 s and 0.018 arc sec respectively. The average value we obtained for the radial Love number h for the solid earth is 0.62±0.02 (estimated standard error).

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“…Over the last two decades, space geodetic techniques have evolved rapidly and have now attained sufficient precision that measurements of position changes over regions of hundreds to thousands of kilometers with accuracies better than 10 mm/yr are now common [Clark et al, 1985;Herring et al, 1986;Ma et al, 1990;Smith et al, 1990;Elgered et al, 1991]. One of these techniques, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), has been in use since the late 1960s [Shapiro and Knight, 1970] and initially was capable of measuring with 1-m precision the distances between telescopes separated -1000 km [Shapiro et al, 1974].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Submillimeter horizontal position determination using very long baseline interferometry

Herring¹

1992

J. Geophys. Res.

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An analysis of interferometric phase delays from 15 years of Mark I and Mark III very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiments carried out with two radio telescopes in Westford, Massachusetts, -1.24 km apart, yields weighted root-mean-square (WRMS) scatters about the mean locally horizontal coordinates of 1.0 and 2.0 mm in the north and east directions, respectively. The vertical coordinate scatter over this same duration is 3.2 min. The measurements made during the last decade using the more accurate Mark III VLBI system yield WRMS scatters of 0.7, 0.8, and 2.3 ram, for the north, east, and vertical coordinates, respectively. Analysis of this latter data set using the less accurate, but more commonly used, group delay measurements yields WRMS scatters of 1.8, 2.5, and 2.8 mm for the nonl•, east, and height components, respectively. The estimated rates of change of the coordinates of the baselines from the phase delay solution are -0.12 + 0.04, -0.09 + 0.07, and -0.26 + 0.11 mm/yr for the 15-year analysis, and -0.11 + 0.05, 0.08 + 0.06, and -0.15 + 0.15 mm/yr for the last decade. From these results, the maximum admissible rate of change of this baseline, either from geophysical causes or from telescope deformation, can be bounded to be less than 0.5 mm/yr (95% confidence interval) in all coordinate directions. We conclude from these studies that VLBI antennas of at least of the structural quality of the pair in Westford satisfy a necessary but not sufficient condition for being able to maintain a global reference system with submillimeter per year accuracy for intervals in excess of a decade. These data are also used to determine an error model for the VLBI group delay measurements, and, for this paxticular pair of telescopes, they indicate that the WRMS difference between group and phase delays is composed of a constant paxt (5.4 ram, for the most recent data) and a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) term which is-10% larger than that computed theoretically.

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Geodesy by radio interferometry: Intercontinental distance determinations with subdecimeter precision

Cited by 32 publications

References 11 publications

Earth Rotation Information Derived from Merit and Polaris VLBI Observations

Earth Rotation Information Derived from Merit and Polaris VLBI Observations

Geodesy by radio interferometry: Determinations of baseline vector, Earth rotation, and solid earth tide parameters with the Mark I Very Long Baseline Radio Interferometry System

Submillimeter horizontal position determination using very long baseline interferometry

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