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Statistical Analysis of the Results of 20 Years of Activity of the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry

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Abstract

As of 2019, the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS) has existed for 20 years. This service is the largest and most prominent organization that coordinates international activities in its field, which currently includes approximately 60 radio telescopes located in many countries from all continents. The IVS data center has accumulated more than 18 million observations obtained during more than 17 000 observation sessions, including more than 10 000 short sessions for rapid determination of universal time. This paper follows the dynamics of IVS development based on the statistical processing of the observational array accumulated in the IVS data center for 1979–2018. Statistics for observation years, stations, baselines, and radio sources are given. The evolution of observation statistics and the accuracy of the results obtained from the processing of VLBI observations is considered.

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  1. https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/

  2. https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/org/documents/index.html

  3. ftp://cddis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/vlbi/ivsdata/

  4. https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/stations/index.html

  5. https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/technology/vgos-general.html

  6. https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/program/operafiles.html

  7. ftp://cddis.nasa.gov/vlbi/ivsproducts/eops/gsf2016a.eops.gz

  8. ftp://cddis.nasa.gov/vlbi/ivsproducts/eopi/pul2010a.eopi.gz

  9. https://github.com/AstroLis/VGOSdb2NGS

  10. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All the VLBI observations used in this study were obtained thanks to many years of difficult and highly skilled work of many people and organizations who have contributed to the work of the IVS: observation stations and correlators, technical centers and observation planning and processing centers, as well as IVS coordinators. Their contribution to the development of science deserves the highest recognition.

The author is grateful to Daniel MacMillan (NVI Inc., NASA GSFC) for the provided series of station coordinates and baseline lengths, as well as David Gordon (NVI Inc., NASA GSFC) and Alan Fey (US Naval Observatory) for the provided catalogs of radio source coordinates.

Part of the observations for 2018 was processed using the vgosDB-to-NGS data converterFootnote 9 written by Svetlana Mironova, Elena Skurikhina, and Sergey Kurdubov (Institute of Applied Astronomy, Russian Academy of Sciences).

The abstract database of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)Footnote 10 was used in the preparation of this article.

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewer for useful remarks to the initial version of the article.

Funding

The study was in part funded by the subsidy granted under the state support of the Kazan Federal University in order to increase its competitiveness among the world’s leading scientific and educational centers.

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  1. Central (Pulkovo) Astronomical Observatory, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Z. M. Malkin

  2. Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia

    Z. M. Malkin

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Malkin, Z.M. Statistical Analysis of the Results of 20 Years of Activity of the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry. Astron. Rep. 64, 168–188 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063772920020043

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