Recent Results of Radio Interferometric Determinations of a Transcontinental Baseline, Polar Motion, and Earth Rotation

Abstract

Radio interferometric observations of extragalactic radio sources have been made with antennas at the Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California during fourteen separate experiments distributed between September 1976 and May 1978. The components of the baseline vector and the coordinates of the sources were estimated from the data from each experiment separately. The root-weighted-mean-square scatter about the weighted mean (“repeatability”) of the estimates of the length of the 3900 km baseline was approximately 7 cm, and of the source coordinates, approximately 0 ^″_. 015 or less, except for the declinations of low-declination sources. With the source coordinates all held fixed at the best available, a posteriori, values, and the analyses repeated for each experiment, the repeatability obtained for the estimate of baseline length was 4 cm. From analyses of the data from several experiments simultaneously, estimates were obtained of changes in the x component of pole position and in the Earth’s rotation (UT1). Comparison with the corresponding results obtained by the Bureau International de l’Heure (BIH) discloses systematic differences. In particular, the trends in the radio interferometric determinations of the changes in pole position agree more closely with those from the International Polar Motion Service (IPMS) and from the Doppler observations of satellites than with those from the BIH.