Verbesserte Bestimmung der Erdrotation durch Nutzung des Wettzell Twin-Radioteleskops mit optimierten Beobachtungsplänen

Final Report Abstract

In this project the groundwork has been laid for an optimal contribution of the TTW to the IVS Intensive observations. One highlight has been the development of a state of the art scheduling method which optimizes the geometry of VLBI Intensive sessions successfully. This scheduling method, which bases on the impact factors of the observations, can be used to create Intensive observing plans as of now. In addition, the scheduling method has been used to create a series of observing plans for Intensive sessions including twin telescopes. In preparing these schedules, various parametrizations of the twin telescopes have been examined. The produced observing plans have been studied extensively by synthetic observations which have been created with a Monte-Carlo simulator. Summarizing, the usage of twin telescopes significantly improves the precision of the target Earth rotation parameter UT1.

Publications

• Geodetic VLBI Intensive Scheduling based on Singular Value Decomposition. Proceedings of the 20th Meeting of the European VLBI Group for Geodesy and Astrometry, Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Geodäsie und Geoinformation der Rheinischen-Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn, Bonn, p. 9 – 13, 2011
  J. Pietzner and A. Nothnagel
  
• Prospects of IVS-Intensive Sessions with Twin-Telescopes. Proceedings of the 7th IVS General Meeting, NASA, CP, 2012
  J. Leek, T. Artz and A. Nothnagel