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Sovers, Ojars

Publications and source records attributed to Sovers, Ojars.

3 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2010

Use of Reference Frames for Interplanetary Navigation at JPL

Navigation of interplanetary spacecraft is typically based on range, Doppler, and differential interferometric measurements made by ground-based telescopes. Acquisition and interpretation of these observations requires accurate knowledge of the terrestrial reference frame and its orientation with respect to the celestial frame. Work is underway at JPL to reprocess historical VLBI and GPS data to improve realizations of the terrestrial and celestial frames. Improvements include minimal constraint alignment, improved tropospheric modeling, better orbit determination, and corrections for antenna phase center patterns.

International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF)↗
NASA NTRS2000

A Proposed Astrometric Observing Program for Densifying the ICRF in the Northern Hemisphere

The International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) could be of significant importance to the astronomy community for observing weak objects angularly close to ICRF sources with the phase-referencing technique. However, the current distribution of the ICRF sources is found to be largely non-uniform, which precludes the wide use of the ICRF as a catalog of calibrators for phase-referencing observations. We show that adding 150 new sources at appropriate sky locations would reduce the distance to the nearest ICRF source for any randomly-chosen location in the northern sky from up to 13 deg to up to 6 deg, close to the requirement of the phase-referencing technique. Accordingly, a set of 150 such sources, selected from the Jodrell Bank-VLA Astrometric Survey and filtered out using the Very Long Baseline Array Calibrator Survey, has been proposed for observation to the European VLBI Network (EVN) extended with additional geodetic stations. The use of the EVN is essential to this project since most of the new sources will be weaker and thus difficult to observe with standard geodetic networks.

Charlot, Patrick↗