_                   
                                                         |_|                  
      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 celebrated its fifth birthday on February 12th with a VSOP Survey Program observation of the PKS 0400-319, a 1 Jy quasar at a redshift of 1.288. As will be described in more detail next issue, a number of visitors were at ISAS on the day for VSOP Survey Program meetings, and the occasion was marked by watching a video of HALCA's launch at 1:50pm JST, coinciding with the time of launch five years ago.

VSOP MISSION STATUS

The Tidbinbilla and Robledo (or Canberra and Madrid) tracking stations finished their participation in the VSOP mission on February 7th, five years to the day from the signing of the ISAS/NASA Memorandum of Understanding. The Green Bank tracking station was able to continue until the end of February. The JPL orbit determination group has also ended its involvement in the VSOP mission. We thank all those who have contributed to the construction, upkeep and day-to-day operation of these mission elements, which have played a great role in the success of the VSOP mission, and of course express our gratitude to NASA for the funding which made those contributions possible. NASA-funded operations support at the VLBA correlator will continue until May to allow the last VSOP observations involving the VLBA to be correlated and operations wrapped up.

The VSOP mission has moved into its next phase, with observations now being concentrated on VSOP Survey Program sources. At the current rate of two observations a week, all 289 survey sources will have been observed by February 2003. Over the last two years, Survey Program observations were cut back to only one a month, so that as many General Observing Time observations as possible could be carried out while NASA-funded mission elements were participating in the mission.

VSOP-2 MEETINGS

The latest in a series of international meetings to discuss planning for the future of space VLBI was held at ISAS on February 7th and 8th, with colleagues from Australia, Canada, Europe and the USA in attendance. Progress on a number of aspects of the VSOP-2 mission was described and discussed. It is intended to submit the proposal to ISAS for the VSOP-2 mission later this year.

There has been considerable activity within the USA recently, culminating in the submission of a white paper to NASA's Structure and Evolution of the Universe (SEU) roadmap committee. The white paper describes iARISE, an international future space VLBI mission involving two orbiting satellites, with nominally one of these being the VSOP-2 satellite and the other a US-funded satellite. The likelihood of a two satellite mission eventuating depends on the outcome of the NASA SEU roadmap, which is expected to be known by the northern hemisphere fall of this year.

                Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi