15th IVS Directing Board meeting Summary notes Held at Universidad de Concepcion, Concepcion, Chile January 13, 2006 Notes by DB, first version 060213 Revised 060228 Attending: Wolfgang Schlueter, Arthur Niell, Chopo Ma, Dirk Behrend, Ed Himwich, Kerry Kingham, Yasuhiro Koyama, Bill Petrachenko, Harald Schuh, Axel Nothnagel, Shigeru Matsuzaka, Alan Whitney ACTIONS: 1. Welcome (Wolfgang Schlueter) Zinovy Malkin, Patrick Wallace, Franco Mantovani and Roy Booth could not attend. Patrick Charlot participated as guest without vote. 2. Reports and discussion 2.1 Chair's report (Wolfgang Schlueter) Correspondence: - Supporting letter to the President of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Italy (Prof. Benvenuti) thanking for the contributions to VLBI and requesting continuous support after the transition from CNR to INAF. - Letter to NCRIS Committee of the Department of Education, Science and Training of Australia supporting the proposal by Geoscience Australia to establish an Australian National Geospatial Reference System of a co-located network of multiple geodetic techniques. - Letters to the members of the VLBI2010 Committee thanking them for their willingness to serve on the committee. - Accompanying letter for the WG3 Final Report. Papers: - The papers "IVS High Accuracy Products for the Maintenance of the Global Reference Frames as a Contribution to GGOS" and "VLBI2010: A Vision for Future Geodetic VLBI" presented at the IAG Scientific Assembly in Cairns were accepted for publication in the IAG Symposia series. 2.2 Coordinating Center report (Dirk Behrend) Activities since the last board meeting were: - Publication of December newsletter. - Maintenance of mailing lists and web site. - The Continuous VLBI Campaign 2005 (CONT05) was coordinated. - 2006 Observing plan was prepared. - Coordination of the 4th General Meeting (GM2006). - VLBI2010 Committee (V2C) support. - Liaison with other services was done in the frame of the INDIGO and GGOS projects. Dirk will announce the availability of the CONT05 data in the IAG Newsletter once the Bonn group has created a uniform data set (e.g., clock consistency, troposphere). A note on the replacement of the reprocessed CONT05 data will also be sent to the ACs. 2.3 Observing Program Committee report (Dirk Behrend) Issues discussed in the period since the last board meeting include: - Frequency of CONT campaigns expected to be no greater than once every two years. - 2006 observing program is very similar to that of 2005. - observation time for T2s (18-18 vs. 0-24) will remain 18-18. - General 0-24 UT observing. - Correlator instructions. Session notes will be expanded. - Japanese SELENE project will be supported at Wettzell. - Gilmore Creek observation suspension ramifications. 2.3.1 Situation Gilmore Creek (Chopo Ma) Wolfgang will prepare a letter of concern to be sent to the NASA official (John LaBrecque). 2.3.2 Situation Matera (Wolfgang Schlueter) Matera suspended observations at the beginning of the year due to contract renewal problems. Wolfgang drafted a letter of concern to the President of the Italian Space Agency. After minor revision the letter was sent during the meeting. 2.4 Analysis Coordinator report (Axel Nothnagel) The timeliness of solution submissions is a critical issue. Submissions are not uniform in time and delays occur on a irregular basis. The baseline length pilot project supports a web page at the Analysis Coordinator's web site. 2.5 Network Coordinator report (Ed Himwich) Station status: - Gilcreek stopped operations - Matera is temporarily closed: seems to be a bureaucratic problem, may learn something next week [Matera back up as of Feb 6.] - Noto is "down" with antenna problem - Special configurations - Operating Fortaleza with mixed bandwidth for R1 - Operating Seshan with only eight BBCs - Russian stations - Svetloe started operations last year - Zelenchukskaya is starting operations - Badari is under development RDV operations still mostly require tapes. The VLBA supports only VLBA stations with disks, other stations are tape. Station performance: Stations that have a data loss of 10% or less is increasing. It appears that stations with troubles have bigger/increasing problems. 2.6 Technology Coordinator report (Alan Whitney) VSI-E: Beta version of VSI-E is being tested in transfers from Kashima to Haystack (has been a bit delayed by network problems). Plan to submit VSI-E protocol for approval by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as international standard after agreement within e-VLBI community and successful demonstrations. Real-time e-VLBI SC05 Demo: Real-time transmission and correlation of data from antennas in Westford, MA, Greenbelt, MD, and Onsala, Sweden at 512 Mbps/antenna. The demo is a good vehicle to get attention. Progress towards routine e-VLBI: In September 2005 all CONT05 data from Tsukuba were transferred to Haystack via e-VLBI (~15 TB). Also all Syowa data from 2004-2005 were transferred via e-VLBI from Japan to Haystack. In November 2005 a project was initiated to connect Ny Alesund to Haystack through NASA/GSFC at up to 100 Mbps. Routine e-VLBI from Ny Alesund is expected within a few months. In December 2005 funds were secured to connect Forteleza at 2.5 Gbps. Connections: The list of antennas with high speed network connections includes stations with a wide range of connection speeds from multi-gigabits/sec to a few megabits/sec. Wolfgang reports Bonn tries to establish a 1 Gbps connection during 2006. e-VLBI workshops: Successful e-VLBI workshop held in Sydney, Australia in July 2005. Next e-VLBI workshop will be held at Haystack in mid-October 2006. Mark 5A status: ~120 Mark 5 systems have been deployed. Many stations are now entirely Mark 5A. 1 Gbps experiments are now routine for both geodesy and astronomy. VLBA is converting to Mark 5. Mark 5B status: Checkout of Mark 5B hardware is complete. Data recorded on Mark 5B was software-converted to Mark 5A format and correlated through station unit on Mark IV correlator. 15 Mark 5B I/O boards have been built and tested. They will be distributed to Mark 5 development consortia members in near future. Mark 5A/B Compatibility: Mark 5B can play only Mark 5B recordings (VSI format in/out). Upgraded Mark 5A ("Mark 5A+") will be able to play all Mark 5A recordings and Mark 5B recordings that are made in selected modes. The playback will be VLBA-track-format. Disk-Media Reliability: Average disk drive failure rate is ~0.5% per year. Failure rate of Hitachi 250GB has been higher than average. Disk reliability at high altitudes is under investigation. 2.7 Information about developments at NICT (Yasuhiro Koyama) Recent developments of the K5 system: USB2.0 version of K5/VSSP = K5/VSSP32 yields up to 64 Msps sampling each channel, supports up to 1024 Mbps with 16 channels and does not require PCI extension bay. VSI-S implementation to K5/VSI system - succeeded to control the unit from fs9 by developing VSI-S command interpreter program modules. The current 5-year project ends at the end of March. The next 5-year project will start in April. 2.8 VLBI2010 Committee report (Bill Petrachenko) The committee is getting off the ground. An email exploder was set up and the memo series will come online. A deadline of June 2006 was set to provide antenna design parameters of the next generation VLBI system. For that simulation studies will be done by the Vienna and Goddard groups. Multiple dish sizes will be looked into. The next face-to-face meeting is planned to take place in conjunction with the e-VLBI meeting at Haystack in October. 3. Items related to IAG, IAU, EVN 3.1 IAG 3.1.1 IAG (Harald Schuh) The papers to be published in the volume for the Cairns meeting run through a complete review process. The publications will not be proceedings but peer-reviewed articles. There will be 3 IAG Symposia in 2006: - VI Hotine-Marussi Symposium of Theoretical and Computational Geodesy, Wuhan, China, May 29 - June 2 - 1st International Symposium of the International Gravity Field Service, Istanbul, Turkey, August 28 - September 1 - XXIII International FIG Congress, Munich, October 8-13 (joint with German InterGeo 2006) Harald Schuh, Chopo Ma, and Dirk Behrend participated in the GGOS Steering Committee meeting during AGU in San Francisco. GGOS is setting up its organizational structure. The board named Dirk Behrend to be the IVS Representative on the GGOS Steering Committee with general consensus. [In an email vote after the board meeting, Wolfgang Schlueter was named Alternate.] 3.1.2 Commission 1 (Chopo Ma) nothing to report 3.1.3. EVGA (Axel Nothnagel) The frequency of the EUROPE experiments were increased from 4 to 6. 3.1.4 IERS (Chopo Ma, Axel Nothnagel) Markus Rothacher will write short summary on status of the Combination Pilot Project to be sent to the IERS Directing Board. The next IERS Directing Board meeting takes place on Saturday April 8 directly after the EGU meeting in Vienna. 3.2 IAU (Patrick Charlot) The XXVIth IAU General Assembly will be held in Prague on August 14-25, 2006. Chopo Ma mentioned the plan to set up an IAU Working Group on the next ICRF. A Commission 19 meeting is planned for August 17. JD16: "Nomenclature, Precession and New Models in Fundamental Astronomy" will be held on August 22-23, 2006 and is organized by N. Capitaine & J. Vondrak. Division I Working Groups "Nomenclature for fundamental astronomy" and "Precession and the Ecliptic" requests reports to be submitted before 15 May 2006. There are several proposals for the IAU 2006 Resolutions: Harmonizing the name of the pole and origin to "intermediate" (+ glossary); default orientation of the BCRS and GCRS; adoption of a new precession model (P03, Capitaine et al. 2003). These resolutions will supplement the IAU Resolutions 2000. A 2007 IAU Symposium "A giant Step for Astrometry: Hipparcos to GAIA", October 22-26, 2007, Shanghai, China has been proposed. SOFA (Chair: P. Wallace): New release of software on 1 Sep 2005. Inclusion of UTC leap second at the end of 2005. Preparations in hand for adding support for the P03 precession model (paper by Capitaine & Wallace submitted). FAGS (Federation of Astronomical and Geophysical Services): Current situation: ICSU’s sponsorship of FAGS extended for a period of 3 years at 28th ICSU General Assembly (China, Oct. 2005). FAGS to continue to fulfill its role of coordination among the Services during this period, while ICSU reexamines this function. 3.3 EVN (Partick Charlot) EVN operations: Disk-only operations since February 05. Tapes still needed for joint VLBA-EVN observations. It is planned that 1 Gbps will become the default observing mode for all continuum EVN-only projects. New milestone of the PCInt project includes possibility to correlate at JIVE with 1/8 and 1/16 integration times. EVN to offer e-VLBI observing opportunity for science sharing technical test time. EXPReS (EXpress Production Real-time e-VLBI Service): Its objective is to make e-VLBI an operational astronomical instrument. 16 telescopes distributed across Europe (and beyond) are connected to JIVE at 1 Gbps. Proposal was submitted to the EC in March 2005. EXPReS rated No. 1 out of 43 proposals. Spacecraft tracking: A team of radioastronomers led by JIVE (Gurvits et al.) detected and tracked the Huygens probe descent trajectory by VLBI. The a priori accuracy of ~100 km was improved to ~25 km with "Doppler inter- ferometry" and to ~1 km by VLBI. 4. Technical discussions 4.1 Met data for the VLBI analysis (Harald Schuh) Robert Heinkelmann is collecting met data from the stations. The response to the letter that he sent to the station managers was sparse: he still misses about 50% of data. Wolfgang Schlueter will write a letter to the station managers to support Robert. 4.2 JoG special issue VLBI (Harald Schuh) The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2006. Authors can submit their title and abstract to the editors (Schuh, Nothnagel, Ma) to check if their paper is appropriate for the special issue. If it is not and the contribution is a paper of the General Meeting, the paper will be rerouted to the GM Proceedings. The focus of the special issue is geodetic/astrometric applications of VLBI. The call will be sent by the end of January. 5. Meetings 2006 The next IVS General Meeting will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia. Wolfgang Schlueter will inform Prof. Finkelstein that his invitation is accepted. Upcoming in 2006: - TOG Meeting in Dwingeloo, The Netherlands, March 22-24 - EGU General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, April 2-7 - IAU General Assembly in Prague, Czech Republic, August 14-25 - e-VLBI workshop at Haystack Observatory, October 16-19 - VLBI East Coast meeting (date not set, after October) - next IVS board meeting at Haystack Observatory either on October 20 or October 21 - AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, USA, December 11-15 6. Miscellaneous IAG Newsletter: Information on IVS activities to be posted are VLBI2010 (Dirk), Call for JoG special issue VLBI (Dirk, Harald), and CONT05 (Dirk). Citation: Dirk reported on the strategy for citation adopted by the sister services and showed the citation reference that is in place on the IVS web site. The reference and wording were agreed upon via email. There was consensus among the board members to adopt the general citation strategy as outlined in an IGSmail message. Leap second: The ITU requested through IERS feedback on the experience with the leap second. A questionnaire was sent out at the beginning of the year to poll the views of the IVS community. The IVS will provide a answer to ITU, once the result of the poll is analyzed. The Coordinating Center will ensure that list of Associate members will be up-to-date for the next board elections (January 2007).