Invited Presentation

Astrometry with VSOP, VSOP-2 & how those studies are leading to new breakthroughs

Author(s): Richard Dodson (ICRAR-UWA), Maria Rioja (ICRAR-UWA)

Presenter: Richard Dodson (ICRAR-UWA)

VSOP was not designed for astrometry but - with a bit of inventiveness - astrometrical solutions could be extracted. This was made possible by the high quality of the orbit reconstruction (approximately 100 times better than the nominal requirements) and in-beam phase referencing.

VSOP-2 was designed for astrometry, but was stalled because of the design challenges. Nevertheless it had the capability for both source switching and frequency switching phase referencing. The design studies for VSOP-2 lead directly to the Source/Frequency Phase Referencing method, now championed by the KVN and being rolled out on VERA.

We will review these space VLBI outcomes, and discuss how thinking about these questions has lead us to a suite of astrometrical approaches that work away from the `trivial case' of ground-based cm-VLBI.