A Balloon-Borne Very Long Baseline Interferometry Experiment in the Stratosphere: Systems Design and Developments
Abstract
The balloon-borne very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiment is a technical feasibility study for performing radio interferometry in the stratosphere. The flight model has been developed. A balloon-borne VLBI station will be launched to establish interferometric fringes with ground-based VLBI stations distributed over the Japanese islands at an observing frequency of approximately 20 GHz as the first step. This paper describes the system design and development of a series of observing instruments and bus systems. In addition to the advantages of avoiding the atmospheric effects of absorption and fluctuation in high frequency radio observation, the mobility of a station can improve the sampling coverage (`uv-coverage') by increasing the number of baselines by the number of ground-based counterparts for each observation day. This benefit cannot be obtained with conventional arrays that solely comprise ground-based stations. The balloon-borne VLBI can contribute to a future progress of research fields such as black holes by direct imaging.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1812.04255,
title = {A Balloon-Borne Very Long Baseline Interferometry Experiment in the Stratosphere: Systems Design and Developments},
author = {Akihiro Doi and Yusuke Kono and Kimihiro Kimura and Satomi Nakahara and Tomoaki Oyama and Nozomi Okada and Yasutaka Satou and Kazuyoshi Yamashita and Naoko Matsumoto and Mitsuhisa Baba and Daisuke Yasuda and Shunsaku Suzuki and Yutaka Hasegawa and Mareki Honma and Hiroaki Tanaka and Kosei Ishimura and Yasuhiro Murata and Reiho Shimomukai and Tomohiro Tachi and Kazuya Saito and Naohiko Watanabe and Nobutaka Bando and Osamu Kameya and Yoshinori Yonekura and Mamoru Sekido and Yoshiyuki Inoue and Hikaru Sakamoto and Nozomu Kogiso and Yasuhiro Shoji and Hideo Ogawa and Kenta Fujisawa and Masanao Narita and Hiroshi Shibai and Hideyuki Fuke and Kenta Ueharai and Shoko Koyama},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.04255},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
15 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Advances in Space Research, in press