_                    
                                                         |_|                   
      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  ***                        <)                     
 

SPACE VLBI WORK WEEK

The annual Space VLBI Work Week was held from March 13th to 21st in Ventura, California, and hosted by the JPL Space VLBI Project. The week started with a 2-day VISC meeting, with one of the main agenda items being a review of the proposal review process and outcomes. Mission related resources, interfaces and procedures were then discussed in separate sessions. The meetings provided a valuable forum to work through the details of the mission operations, and revealed a number of new developments and areas requiring further attention.

PROPOSAL REVIEW

The VISC endorsed the SRC's recommendation that a technical re-evaluation be carried out to ensure that proposals are given the resources needed to meet their scientific goals. This is not simply a matter of giving, e.g., all proposers their minimum number of orbits or telescopes, as there was a wide spread of requested resources for essentially the same goals. Proposers will not be contacted with news of the likelihood their experiments being scheduled until after this evaluation is completed and the subsequent long term schedule generated -- a process which will take several weeks.

DYNAMICAL BALANCE AND VIBRATION TESTS

The MUSES-B satellite, now completely fitted out, underwent dynamical balance testing at ISAS yesterday. The spacecraft was mounted on a turntable and slowly spun up to a rotation rate of 1 Hz (the rate needed for spin stabilization in the later stage of the launch). To the untrained eye everything looked perfectly balanced, however test results showed that an extra kilogram or so was needed to fine-tune the balance. Acceleration testing for all three axes will take place over the next week.

VSOP TEST RUNS

Everything appears easy from a distance! The last VSOP news incorrectly reported that the correlation of the first test run data had proceeded smoothly -- at that stage in fact the data had not been correlated at all! The first test run was designed to test all interfaces, and was successful in bringing to light a number of deficiencies in the scheduling/observing/ correlating chain -- such as the inordinate amount of time taken for some tapes to reach Socorro. The lessons learned from the first test run will be put into practice in the second test run, to be conducted on June 16. This run will also include the generation and distribution of tracking station schedules, and so will be a much more realistic simulation of routine VSOG operations. A third run is also being planned for October 16, by which time the new MkIV systems are expected to be in place.

 
 
       Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi