View Related Documents

Abstract

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is a geometric technique which measures the time difference between the arrivals of a radio wavefront emitted by a distant quasar to at least two Earth based radio telescopes. Because the time difference measurements are precise to a few picoseconds, VLBI determines the relative positions of the cooperating radio telescopes to a few millimeter and the positions of the quasars to a few milliarcseconds. The transfer of the collected data from the radiotelescopes to the correlation centers is made through physical shipment of data discs which implies a delay of weeks in the turnaround. eVLBI is a technique which allows the direct transmission of the data to the correlators through Internet with multiples advantages. TIGO is a VLBI station located in Concepción, Chile with a limited bandwidth of few Mbps which must be increased in order to achieve an usable speed to work as an eVLBI station. The challenge and approaches to dodge the difficulties of achieving eVLBI in TIGO are explained in the present paper.

Keywords  Astronomy - Geodesy - VLBI - Network - Internet - Multipath Routing

S. Sobarzo acknowledges support from CONICYT Doctoral Fellowship program. S. Torres acknowledges support to grant Milenio ICM P02-049. The authors also acknowledge the support for the eVLBI tests of Florencio Utreras (Red Clara), Paola Arellano and Sandra Jaque (Reuna), Eduardo Riveras (UdeC-DTI), Alessandra Bertarini (MPIFR), Sergei Pogrebenko (JIVE) and Ed Himwich (MIT).

Fulltext Preview

Image of the first page of the fulltext document