Published April 8, 2025 | Version v1
Presentation Open

VGOS CRF: Celestial Reference Frame from VGOS until Dec 2024

  • 1. ROR icon TU Wien
  • 2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon ETH Zurich
  • 4. ROR icon Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux

Description

We present a celestial reference frame (CRF) from Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Global Observing System (VGOS) including data until December 2024. The VGOS CRF is built with 1.8 million group delays observed in 193 multi-baseline 24-hour sessions (178 VGOS-OPS, 15 VGOS-R&D) with a fixed frequency distribution. It includes 418 radio sources, where 271 sources were observed in VGOS-OPS and 459 sources in VGOS-R&D. We show that VGOS-R&D scheduled with the source-centric method are beneficial for generating the VGOS CRF and at the same time they have been proven to provide high quality geodetic parameters. Comparison with ICRF3-SX reveals that 21% sources have normalized angular separation higher than 5 times the formal error. The VIE2024-VG CRF solution has excellent formal source position precision: median formal precision is 25 microas in right ascension and 41 microas in declination.

Notes (En)

Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS) and all its components for providing VLBI data.

HK and PC acknowledge the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [10.55776/P35920]

The research was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). Copyright 2025. All rights reserved.

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Additional details

Related works

Continues
Journal article: 10.1051/0004-6361/202451996 (DOI)

Funding

FWF Austrian Science Fund
SOFT 10.55776/P35920
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
JPL/Caltech, NASA 80NM0018D0004

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