Determination of UT1 by VLBI

Abstract

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is the only space geodetic technique which is capable of estimating the Earth's phase of rotation, expressed as Universal Time UT1, over time scales of a few days or longer. Satellite-observing techniques like the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are suffering from the fact that Earth rotation is indistinguishable from a rotation of the satellite orbit nodes, which requires the imposition of special procedures to extract UT1 or length of day information. Whereas 24 hour VLBI network sessions are carried out at about three days per week, the hour-long one-baseline intensive sessions (‘Intensives’) are observed from Monday to Friday (INT1) on the baseline Wettzell (Germany) to Kokee Park (Hawaii, U.S.A.), and from Saturday to Sunday on the baseline Tsukuba (Japan) to Wettzell (INT2). Additionally, INT3 sessions are carried out on Mondays between Wettzell, Tsukuba, and Ny-Alesund (Norway), and ultra-rapid e-Intensives between E! urope and Japan also include the baseline Metsähovi (Finland) to Kashima (Japan). The Intensives have been set up to determine daily estimates of UT1 and to be used for UT1 predictions. Because of the short duration and the limited number of stations the observations can nowadays be e-transferred to the correlators, or to a node close to the correlator, and the estimates of UT1 are available shortly after the last observation thus allowing the results to be used for prediction purposes.