_                    
                                                         |_|                   
      V   V   SSSS   OOO   PPPP                 \__      |_|      __/          
      V   V  S      O   O  P   P                   --____/ \____--             
      V   V   SSS   O   O  PPPP                    _ _ _ --- _ _ _             
       V V       S  O   O  P                      |_|_|_|  @|_|_|_|            
        V    SSSS    OOO   P                             o-o                   
                                                          /                    
      ***  N    E    W    S  ***                        <)                     
 

THREE MONTHS TO GO...

The deadline for proposals for Phase 1 General Observing Time observations with the VSOP satellite and ground radio telescopes is Friday 17th November: three months from last Thursday. And as proposals must be mailed to reach ISAS by that day, there are less than three months left!

THE VSOP SURVEY PROGRAM

People interested in joining the mission-led Survey Program (described in detail in section 3 of the AO) should contact the VSOP Project Scientist as soon as possible, but no later than the 1st of September, by e-mail to vsop_ps@vsop.isas.ac.jp.

SURVEY WORKING GROUP MEETING

The SWG meeting will be held at ISAS on Tuesday 5th and Wednesday 6th of September. A draft agenda for the meeting will be e-mailed in the next day or two to those who have expressed an interest in the Survey Program. A summary of the conclusions reached at the SWG meeting will be posted in the week following the meeting on the VSOP WWW page.

USUDA TRACKING STATION

The 10m Usuda tracking station antenna is now ready, and ground telemetry electronics have been sent to Usuda for interface testing. As the same ground telemetry electronics are needed for the second spacecraft integration tests, beginning at ISAS on November 25th, the tracking station interface testing must be completed by then! Next week an international meeting will be held at ISAS to discuss tracking issues.

DOCUMENTS

The VSOP Announcement of Opportunity, Proposer's Guide and Proposal Cover Sheets can be retrieved from anonymous ftp sites at

ISAS      ftp.vsop.isas.ac.jp (133.74.2.131) in /pub/docs
JPL       sgra.jpl.nasa.gov   (128.149.70.4) in /pub/docs
JIVE/EVN  daw10.nfra.nl       (192.87.1.166) in /jive/vsop

Note a new version of the VSOP Proposer's Guide was released on August 10th. The new version differs only in that it has a corrected Table 11: the 22 GHz Pre-Launch Continuum VLBI Survey results. It is not necessary to retrieve the whole Proposer's Guide if you have already done so -- a compressed postscript file containing only the corrected table 11 is available from the ftp sites listed above.

 
 
       Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi