News

European radio astronomers led by a team from JIVE will monitor radio transmissions from SMART-1 using TIGO (Transportable Integrated Geodetic Observatory, Concepcion, Chile), ROEN (Northeastern Space Radio Observatory, Fortaleza, Brazil), Mt. Pleasant Observatory (Hobart, Australia) and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (Narrabri, NSW, Australia).

The JIVE VLBI team has run a successful tracking campaign in the run-up to the planned impact of the ESA SMART-1 spacecraft with the moon in 3rd September 2006. "It is exciting that worldwide radio telescopes can listen to SMART-1 until impact", said Bernard Foing, SMART-1 Project Scientist. More details are available in the ESA press release. 

The e-VLBI project, led at JIVE by Arpad Szomoru, has received a prestigious award for its progress in high speed data transfer at the inaugural IDEA awards ceremony held on April 21st 2006. The winning team comprised Arpad Szomoru (JIVE), Alan Whitney (MIT Haystack Observatory), Yasuhiro Koyama (NICT) and Hisao Uose (NTT Laboratories GEMnet2/GALAXY Project).

In late January 2006, a panel set-up by the European Science Foundation visited JIVE in order to review our activities over the last 5 years. The Panel's Evaluation Report is very positive and was approved by the ESF Executive Board a few days ago.

In January 2006, the National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC) officially joined JIVE - as a full funding partner. This represents an important step forward for all parties, and emphasises the signifcant and growing contribution that the Chinese VLBI community is making to the EVN.

The 8 December 2005 issue of Nature presents seven papers on the Huygens mission to Titan. JIVE scientists co-authored two of the seven Huygens-based papers (Lebreton et al. 2005, Bird et al. 2005).

The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) has announced its annual Laurels for Team Achievement Award for 2005 to the VSOP Team. The award is to be presented at the 56th International Astronautics Congress in Fukuoka, Japan, on 16 October 2005. The team includes scientists and engineers from Japan, Australia, Canada, Europe (The Netherlands) and the USA. The previous recipients of this award are the Russian Mir Space Station Team (2001), the US Space Shuttle Team (2002), the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Team (2003), and the Hubble Space Telescope Team (2004).

The EC PR event hosted by JIVE on the 7th July was a tremendous success and was attended by more than 60 journalists from all over the EU. 

On 4 July 2005, a probe released by the NASA Deep Impact mission spacecraft will crash into the nucleus of comet 9P/Tempel 1. The goal of this experiment is to learn more about comet nuclei: what is their structure, and what do they consist of? The fly-by spacecraft, together with several major observatories on Earth and in space are prepared to follow the event. A team of scientists at JIVE and ASTRON are also getting ready for the big day, preparing to observe the comet with the l4 telescope Westerbork array.

Using an array of radio telescopes, an international team of astronomers has fulfilled an 80 year old dream, measuring for the first time the motion of an entire galaxy in the sky. The astronomers hope to predict with these measurements the future fate of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and determine the dark matter content in the local universe. The team reporting the results in this week's issue of the magazine Science, was led by the young radio astronomer Andreas Brunthaler from the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) in Dwingeloo. Dutch press release also available.