The printed version of the Journal of Geodesy Special Issue on VLBI: Journal of Geodesy, Volume 91, Issue 7, July 2017, is now available at https://link.springer.com/journal/190/91/7/page/1. This volume includes a Preface and 14 scientific articles devoted to various aspects of the VLBI theory, methodology and data analysis.
In the May 2017 Innovation column of GPS World, author Urs Hugentobler discusses the importance of laser ranging to GNSS satellites for improvement in modeling the orbits of these satellites. Better GNSS satellite orbits result in better receiver position accuracies, which are required to improve monitoring of Earth processes.
Many stations in the ILRS network are nearly saturated in their tracking schedule. The ILRS is presently assessing its tracking needs to try to maximize its utility. We recently sent out an email to various ILRS users and groups to ask for user needs. If you want your needs to be considered, and did not receive an email invitation, please send an email to Erricos Pavlis (epavlis @ umbc.edu). Once we compile the results, the ILRS plans to make revisions to its tracking list based on users needs. Therefore, user input is critical. The survey should not take you more than 5-10 minutes to complete, depending on your level of involvement with SLR data. Thank you for supporting the ILRS!
The NASA system used for CDDIS and ILRS email exploders will be undergoing maintenance from 13:00 - 17:00 UTC on April 23.
Many stations in the ILRS network are nearly saturated in their tracking schedule. The ILRS is presently assessing its tracking needs to try to maximize its utility. We recently sent out an email to various ILRS users and groups to ask for user needs. If you want your needs to be considered, and did not receive an email invitation, please send an email to Erricos Pavlis (epavlis @ umbc.edu). Once we compile the results, the ILRS plans to make revisions to its tracking list based on users needs. Therefore, user input is critical. The survey should not take you more than 5-10 minutes to complete, depending on your level of involvement with SLR data. Thank you for supporting the ILRS!
Using software supplied by the IGS Infrastructure Committee, the CDDIS is now generating a combined, concatenated broadcast ephemeris file containing unique multi-GNSS navigation messages in RINEX V3 format. The files, starting operationally in late February 2017, are named BRDC00IGS_R_yyyyddd0000_01D_MM.rnx.gz and are available on the CDDIS in the yearly BRDC directory (ftp://cddis.nasa.gov/gnss/data/daily/YYYY/brdc) and in the daily "p" subdirectories (ftp://cddis.nasa.gov/gnss/data/daily/YYYY/DDD/YYp). The file is created using the individual station "01D_MN.rnx" RINEX 3 broadcast ephemeris files using navigation messages from each satellite constellation and removes duplicate entries. The CDDIS will create older RINEX V3 BRDC files going back to 01/2016 in the near future.
CDDIS successfully moved all primary operations to an upgraded computer system on December 01, 2016; in total, the CDDIS archive was inaccessible to the user community for approximately 30 hours during the transition. The new IT infrastructure provides a more robust, reliable, and expandable system with increased storage capacity to handle future growth. All suppliers of data, derived products, and ancillary files for the CDDIS archive were required to modify their software to use the HTTP protocol for file upload. In addition to new hardware, the CDDIS archive processing software was redesigned and improved to provide for more efficient operations and additional QC on incoming files.
