Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Zharov, Vladimir.
This report presents an overview of the SAI VLBI Analysis Center activities during 2012 and the plans for 2013. The SAI AC analyzes all IVS sessions for computations of the Earth orientation parameters (EOP) and time series of the ICRF source positions and performs research and software development aimed at improving the VLBI technique.
We analyzed the time series of the coordinates of the ICRF radio sources. We show that part of the radio sources, including the defining sources, shows a significant apparent motion. The stability of the celestial reference frame is provided by a no-net-rotation condition applied to the defining sources. In our case this condition leads to a rotation of the frame axes with time. We calculated the effect of this rotation on the Earth orientation parameters (EOP). In order to improve the stability of the celestial reference frame we suggest a new method for the selection of the defining sources. The method consists of two criteria: the first one we call cosmological and the second one kinematical. It is shown that a subset of the ICRF sources selected according to cosmological criteria provides the most stable reference frame for the next decade.