NASA NTRS · 20110011829
X/Ka Celestial Frame Improvements: Vision to Reality
Abstract
In order to extend the International Celestial Reference Frame from its S/X-band (2.3/8.4 GHz) basis to a complementary frame at X/Ka-band (8.4/32 GHz), we began in mid-2005 an ongoing series of X/Ka observations using NASA s Deep Space Network (DSN) radio telescopes. Over the course of 47 sessions, we have detected 351 extra-galactic radio sources covering the full 24 hours of right ascension and declinations down to -45 degrees. Angular source position accuracy is at the part-per-billion level. We developed an error budget which shows that the main errors arise from limited sensitivity, mismodeling of the troposphere, uncalibrated instrumental effects, and the lack of a southern baseline. Recent work has improved sensitivity by improving pointing calibrations and by increasing the data rate four-fold. Troposphere calibration has been demonstrated at the mm-level. Construction of instrumental phase calibrators and new digital baseband filtering electronics began in recent months. We will discuss the expected effect of these improvements on the X/Ka frame.
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Jacobs, C. S., Bagri, D. S., Britcliffe, M. J., Clark, J. E., Franco, M. M., Garcia-Miro, C., Goodhart, C. E., Horiuchi, S., Lowe, S. T., Moll, V. E., Navarro, R., Rogstad, S. P., Proctor, R. C., Sigman, E. H., Skjerve, L. J., Soriano, M. A., Sovers, O. J., Tucker, B. C., Wang, D., White, L. A.. 2010-12-01. X/Ka Celestial Frame Improvements: Vision to Reality. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20110011829
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