Daily Image
28-03-2014
New EVN baselines
| Submitter: | Sergei Pogrebenko |
| Description: | In the last days of 2013, EVN telescopes together with many global partners (37 antennas in total!) participated in observations of a rare opportunity: a very close flyby of the Mars moon Phobos by ESA's Mars Express (MEX) spacecraft. This experiment will be the subject of a future ASTRON/JIVE Daily Image. But on the way to that challenging experiment, the JIVE team conducted several trial observations involving new antennas as potential participants of the MEX-Phobos flyby observations. Among these new antennas were the new 65 m Tianma radio telescope of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, China (the upper left panel), and the 32 m Hitachi radio telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Ibaraki, Japan (the upper right panel). In the test observation of J1232-0224 at 8.4 GHz conducted on 18 Dec 2013, they were joined by the 32 m antennas in Zelenchukskaja and Badary (Russia), members of the KVAZAR network, a collective member of the EVN, Yamaguchi (Japan), operated by the Yamaguchi University and 25m Urumqui (China). Textbook fringes were detected on all baselines (the lower left panel). A decent uv-coverage (the bottom centre panel) of this test allowed us to produce an image of the source (the bottom right panel) with the dynamic range of 1000 in less than 1 hour. The test marked a very welcome potential addition of ~5000 m2 of collecting area to the Eastern extension of EVN and very valuable new baselines. And it paved the way for the successful MEX-Phobos flyby experiment. Stay tuned for more news on the latter! |
| Copyright: | SpaSIA group of JIVE, V. Tudose (Space Science Institute, Romania), W. Wang (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, China), Y. Yonekura and K. Fujisawa (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan), M. Kharinov (KVAZAR, Russia) |
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