Work

VGOS CRF: Celestial Reference Frame from VGOS until Dec 2024

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: We present a celestial reference frame (CRF) from Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Global Observing System (VGOS) including data until December 2024. The VGOS CRF is built with 1.8 million group delays observed in 193 multi-baseline 24-hour sessions (178 VGOS-OPS, 15 VGOS-R&D) with a fixed frequency distribution. It includes 418 radio sources, where 271 sources were observed in VGOS-OPS and 459 sources in VGOS-R&D. We show that VGOS-R&D scheduled with the source-centric method are beneficial for generating the VGOS CRF and at the same time they have been proven to provide high quality geodetic parameters. Comparison with ICRF3-SX reveals that 21% sources have normalized angular separation higher than 5 times the formal error. The VIE2024-VG CRF solution has excellent formal source position precision: median formal precision is 25 microas in right ascension and 41 microas in declination.

Source: Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15237286

Authors: Krasna, Hana, Jacobs, Christopher, Schartner, Matthias, Charlot, Patrick

Institutions: TU Wien, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux

Language: English

Topic: GNSS positioning and interference

Subfield: Aerospace Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Austrian Science Fund

Awards: G3648211085, G9000259828