HR: 09:30h
AN: G21A-07 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: Expected Improvements in VLBI Measurements of the Earth's Orientation
AU: * Ma, C
EM: chopo.ma@nasa.gov
AF: Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 926 Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AB: Measurements of the Earth's orientation since the 1970s using space geodetic techniques have provided a continually expanding and improving data set for studies of the Earth's structure and the distribution of mass and angular momentum. The accuracy of current one-day measurements is better than 100 microarcsec for the motion of the pole with respect to the celestial and terrestrial reference frames and better than 3 microsec for the rotation around the pole. VLBI uniquely provides the three Earth orientation parameters (nutation and UT1) that relate the Earth to the extragalactic celestial reference frame. The accuracy and resolution of the VLBI Earth orientation time series can be expected to improve substantially in the near future because of refinements in the realization of the celestial reference frame, improved modeling of the troposphere and non-linear station motions, larger observing networks, optimized scheduling, deployment of disk-based Mark V recorders, full use of Mark IV capabilities, and e-VLBI. More radical future technical developments will be discussed.
DE: 1210 Diurnal and subdiurnal rotational variations
DE: 1229 Reference systems
DE: 1239 Rotational variations
DE: 1294 Instruments and techniques
SC: Geodesy [G]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting