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2006 IDEA Award Winner e-VLBI

IDEA Award Winner 2006

Very High Speed Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI)

  • Alan Whitney, MIT Haystack Observatory
  • Yasuhiro Koyama, NICT
  • Arpad Szomoru, Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE)
  • Hisao Uose, NTT Laboratories GEMnet2/GALAXY Project (Nominating Award Winner)

In the past several years, advanced scientific research has increasingly benefited from the rapid improvements in ultra high speed Research and Education (R&E) networks. One of the most innovative applications is real-time very long baseline Interferometry, dubbed "e-VLBI," which creates a large-scale virtual radio telescope that is used for generating ultra-high resolution images of distant radio sources for astronomy as well as measuring the earth's orientation and motion in space with unprecedented precision.

Prior to the use of R&E networks, all VLBI relied on magnetic tapes or disk packs at each site to collect continuous data at Gbps per telescope from a radio source such as a distant quasar. These magnetic media are physically shipped to a central correlator for processing. Internet2 and other advanced networks are now making real-time electronic transmission of VLBI data, or e-VLBI, a reality on a global scale. The network-based e-VLBI approach allows scientists to have immediate access to correlation results, even while experiments are in progress, which allows them to make adjustments or changes in strategy to maximize the science output, or to identify and fix problems at telescopes.

The international nature of e-VLBI is one of the most exciting aspects of the project. e-VLBI now links radio telescope facilities in Japan, Australia, Europe and the U.S., and is rapidly displacing the traditional record-and-ship paradigm of the past 30 years. Advanced high-speed data networks stream simultaneous observation data to correlators in the U.S., Europe and Japan, thereby creating a virtual radio telescope with a diameter nearly the size of the earth. VLBI is uniquely suited to advanced global networks since the instrument is fundamentally dispersed on a global scale and requires that high-speed data streams be brought together from spatially-diverse telescopes for processing.  The ultimate payoff for science will be higher sensitivity, which increases with increasing data rate, as well as rapid turnaround of processed data for increased productivity.

Alan Whitney
Principal Research Scientist and Associate Director
MIT Haystack Observatory

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