Very long baseline interferometer

Abstract

My countrymen (and, unfortunately, nowadays also women) are internationally known for their furious drinking habits. If it were not so, I would not have come to know the topical area of this review so fast. My very first personal connection to VLBI - which is the acronym for Very Long Baseline Interferometry - was about 25 years ago. The students of my own university had (and still have) each spring their cclebration on the 1st of May, and I, myself, a shy boy from the countryside, escaped all the noise and fuss to the brand new radio astronomical station located some 15 miles away. I had the key to those premises because I was, at that time, a temporary research assistant in thc radio laboratory and tried to design a satellite receiver to be used at that station. While staying overnight to avoid all the parties and drunken friends of the campus area, I met a couple of young scientists and followed their astronomical measurements for awhile. Later on, I came to know that what they were doing was a set of initial steps of VLBI in our country. So, I was pretty excited when I found one of the recently translated books, which originally appeared a couple of years ago in the Japanese Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) Series under the title “Wave Summit Course, ” and is called Very Long Baseline Interferometer. The first publisher in Japan was Omsha, Ltd., and the English version under review comes from 10s Press, Inc. This new volume is written by four leading CRL scientists in the field, Fujinobu Takahashi, Tetsuro Kondo, Yukio Takahashi and Yasuhiro Koyama, who have all worked at the Kashima VLBI station in Japan during their career, and thus, have both a theoretical and practical view of the topics involved. The book has a foreword written by the series editor and a joint preface from the individual authors. The former indicates that Very Long Baseline Interferometer is intended to be used as a university textbook on the undergraduate, as well as postgraduate, level. The preface wants to emphasize two different aspects. First, the book is said to be focused on showing how VLBI is able to provide the ultimate precision in geodesy; second, as the authors write ‘‘Ifthis textproves useful in overcoming to some degree the huge advantage that the US presently enjoys in GPS and other measuring technologies, we will be gratified beyond our expectations. ” In order to fulfill these tasks and missions, the book uses seven main chapters and an appendix with five tables, which contain source data for presented methods. Answers to selected qucstions to support an undergraduate student in his or her independent attempts are provided in a separate section. The alphabetical index has some 450 items, and in the end, there is a short list (about 50 lines) of acronyms. I was unable to find any description of the numerous mathematical symbols which are mainly used in Chapter 3. Interestingly, the authors have included a rather patriotic-looking postscript, too, after which we see their biographies.