Short-baseline interferometry local-tie experiments at the Onsala Space Observatory

Eskil Varenius; Rüdiger Haas; Tobias Nilsson

doi:10.1007/s00190-021-01509-5

Short-baseline interferometry local-tie experiments at the Onsala Space Observatory

J Geod. 2021;95(5):54. doi: 10.1007/s00190-021-01509-5. Epub 2021 Apr 22.

Authors

Eskil Varenius¹, Rüdiger Haas¹, Tobias Nilsson²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Onsala Space Observatory, Chalmers University of Technology, 439 92 Onsala, Sweden.
² Lantmäteriet - The Swedish Mapping, Cadastral, and Land Registration Authority, Lantmäterigatan 2C, 801 82 Gävle, Sweden.

Abstract

We present results from observation, correlation and analysis of interferometric measurements between the three geodetic very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) stations at the Onsala Space Observatory. In total, 25 sessions were observed in 2019 and 2020, most of them 24 h long, all using X band only. These involved the legacy VLBI station ONSALA60 and the Onsala twin telescopes, ONSA13NE and ONSA13SW, two broadband stations for the next-generation geodetic VLBI global observing system (VGOS). We used two analysis packages: $ν$ Solve to pre-process the data and solve ambiguities, and ASCOT to solve for station positions, including modelling gravitational deformation of the radio telescopes and other significant effects. We obtained weighted root mean square post-fit residuals for each session on the order of 10-15 ps using group-delays and 2-5 ps using phase-delays. The best performance was achieved on the (rather short) baseline between the VGOS stations. As the main result of this work, we determined the coordinates of the Onsala twin telescopes in VTRF2020b with sub-millimetre precision. This new set of coordinates should be used from now on for scheduling, correlation, as a priori for data analyses, and for comparison with classical local-tie techniques. Finally, we find that positions estimated from phase-delays are offset $\sim + 3$ mm in the up-component with respect to group-delays. Additional modelling of (elevation dependent) effects may contribute to the future understanding of this offset.

Keywords: Geodetic VLBI; Geodetic core sites; Onsala Space Observatory; Onsala twin telescopes; Short-baseline interferometry; VGOS.