IVIA - Ibero-American VLBI Initiative -Progress on the Brazilian side.

Jacques R.D Lepine,Fatima Salete Correra,Ulisses Barres De Almeida,Militão Vieira Figueredo,Antonio Sandro Verri,Fernando Virgilio Roig,Wesley Beccaro,Jean Pierre Raulin,Danilo Cesar Zanella,Tania Dominici,Marcelo Borges Fernandes,Yasuchi Hadano,Thiago Signorini Gonçalves,André Wiermann,Karin Menéndez-Delmestre,Carlos Guillermo G De Castro,Marcos Aurelio Luqueze

doi:10.1590/0001-3765202120201697

Abstract

IVIA is a joint initiative of at least 8 Latin-American countries plus Portugal and Spain to make good use of large telecommunications antennas that are out of service in these countries, because most international communications are now using submarine cables. The first step will be to refurbish the antennas and then to start doing single dish observations of radiosources. In a second step the antennas will be equipped with VLBI (Very Long Base Interferometry) equipment, to establish a VLBI network. This project will be able to effectively promote scientific integration in Ibero-America. The work is starting in several countries; here we present several scientific cases for the use of the antennas, and we report on the first Brasilian activities.

Highlights

There is a number of large telecommunication antennas in Latin America, plus Portugal and Spain (Ibero-America for short), with diameters up to 32 m, that are out of use, since the communications have been transferred to much more performant submarine optical fiber cables
An important program for the second phase of the IVIA project could be to obtain the distance of the methanol masers by means of parallax measurements using very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), to determine the position of the spiral arms that can only be oberved from the South
We report on the experiment of radar VLBI observations of the asteroid 2012 DA14 (Nechaeva et al 2015)

Summary

Introduction

There is a number of large telecommunication antennas in Latin America, plus Portugal and Spain (Ibero-America for short), with diameters up to 32 m, that are out of use, since the communications have been transferred to much more performant submarine optical fiber cables. The single dish phase will probably occupy the first 2 years, but will have a continuation even after the VLBI equipment is available, since the VLBI activities will use only part of the antena time. VERA is a VLBI network which has some similarities with IVIA in number and sizes of the antennas.

Results

Conclusion