RAEGE Capabilities: A Simulation Study

RAEGE is a project resulting from the cooperation between the National Geographic Institute of Spain (IGN Spain) and the Government of Azores. It is aimed to set up four multi-technique stations: two in Spain (Yebes and Gran Canaria) and two in Azores (Flores and Santa Maria). These stations will stablish a Iberatlantic Very Long Baseline Interferometry VLBI observing network meeting the international requirements needed for VGOS. Currently the VGOS-antennas at Yebes and Santa Maria are operational, the other two are in the planning stage. The RAEGE project focuses not only on the instrumentation and on operating the observations and stations, but also on developing analysis capabilities. With this objective a cooperation between IGN Spain, Azores Government and the University of Alicante was born for exploding the geodetic observations of the RAEGE observatories for geodetic and geodynamic purposes. The key feature of this network is its distribution over three tectonic plates (Eurasian, African and North American), which will augment the estimates of the movements between the plates, both in direction and speed and thus improve the TRF (Terrestrial Reference Frame). Major improvements are expected for constraining the rotational component of the African plate, where we have currently only one VLBI station in South Africa and a very sparse network of about 30 IGS-GNSS antennas over the entire continent. Within this study we want to explore the capabilities of the RAEGE-network in ”stand-alone” mode, i.e. wich accuracies can be reached with this network in terms of EOP and station position accuracies, and in a second step we evaluate the performance when expanding the network with additional VGOS-antennas of the IVS network.

Esther Azcue[2], Maria Karbon[1], Santiago Belda[1], Victor Puente García[2], Mariana Moreira[3]

Type Presentation

Event European VLBI Group for Geodesy and Astrometry 26th EVGA Working Meeting

[1] Departamento de Matemática Aplicada, Universidad de Alicante, Spain

[2] National Geographic Institute of Spain, Madrid, Spain

[3] Estação RAEGE de Santa Maria, Associação RAEGE Açores, Santa Maria – Azores, Portugal