_                   
                                                         |_|                  
      V   V   SSSS   OOO   PPPP                 \__      |_|      __/         
      V   V  S      O   O  P   P                   --____/ \____--            
      V   V   SSS   O   O  PPPP                    _ _ _ --- _ _ _            
       V V       S  O   O  P                      |_|_|_|  @|_|_|_|           
        V    SSSS    OOO   P                             o-o                  
                                                          /                   
      ***  N    E    W    S  ***                        <)                    

HALCA STATUS

HALCA was successfully rebooted on the 29th of November, and since then the on-board systems have been restarted one by one and checked out. The ku-band (15 GHz) link system was restarted on December 2nd -- the establishment of a two-way link with the Usuda tracking station confirming everything was okay. All in all, the recovery has gone as planned and on schedule. HALCA pointing will be confined to the anti-sun region for the rest of this year, with planning for a small number of observations in December underway. HALCA will see in the new millennium staring directly away from the sun, and preparing for the exciting new year ahead!

SRC3 RESULTS

The Science Review Committee is making its final deliberations on the proposals submitted in response to the third Announcement of Opportunity. Principal Investigators, or their designated contacts, will be informed of the results of the review in the week of December 13th.

VSOP SYMPOSIUM

The draft program for the VSOP symposium next January will also be available from the Symposium web page in the week of December 13th. Symposium participants are encouraged to make their accommodation bookings at their soonest convenience -- see /astro/halca/vsop/symposium.html.en for more details.

PENTICTON CORRELATOR UPDATE

Due to a number of requests from PI's of VSOP experiments, the Penticton correlator has started storing representative auto-correlation spectra for all participating telescopes in experiments correlated at Penticton. These can be found at ftp://ftp.drao.nrc.ca/pub/vsop/autocorr. Change directory to the observation month of the experiment of interest and you will find the spectra. This service only applies to data that have been correlated since October 1, 1999. Those interested in more technical details of the Penticton correlator should refer to the recently published paper "The S2 VLBI Correlator: A Correlator for Space VLBI and Geodetic Signal Processing" by Carlson et al., published in PASP vol. 111, p. 1025 (and available from astro-ph/9908314).

VSOP STANDARD ACKNOWLEDGMENT

PI's are reminded of the mission's request that scientific papers which use data from VSOP observations include the following text in the Acknowledgments: "We gratefully acknowledge the VSOP Project, which is led by the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in cooperation with many organizations and radio telescopes around the world."

                Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi