_                   
                                                         |_|                  
      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  ***                        <)                    

VSOP AWARD

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers awarded VSOP Project Manager Prof. H. Hirosawa and VSOP Project Scientist Prof. H. Hirabayashi one of six Awards for 2002 for Excellent Achievement. The award, for `Development of the Radio-astronomy Satellite HALCA and the Realization of Space-VLBI', was presented during the Annual General Meeting of the society in Tokyo on May 28. The achievements of the HALCA spacecraft and the VSOP mission are the result of efforts by many individuals from a large number of organizations, including ISAS, NAOJ, and many international institutions.

REDUCTION OF PENTICTON DATA

The survey data reduction team has succeeded in pin-pointing a puzzling problem that had been noticed over the last few months, involving data reduction of observations correlated at Penticton. The problem was quite literally "data reduction", as amplitudes were found to be reduced by a factor of ~15 on all baselines! However, the problem was not seen by all members of the survey team, and did not seem confined to observations from any particular period. It was finally realised that the error arose from a modification to FITLD made affecting the TST (31DEC02) and NEW (31DEC01) versions of AIPS, but not the OLD (31DEC00) version that some survey members were still using. The modification resulted in a weighting factor of 0.0625 (or 1/16) inadvertently not being applied for Penticton data. Eric Greisen has corrected this problem, and the `midnight job' version of AIPS now runs correctly. (A workaround for earlier versions of TST and NEW is to apply a factor of 4 gain correction for each antenna in CLCOR.) Our thanks to Eric, the survey data reduction team, in particular Shinji Horiuchi, and Penticton correlator staff, for their efforts in identifying and correcting this problem.

PUBLICATION

The paper "VSOP Space VLBI and Geodetic VLBI Investigations of Southern Hemisphere Radio Sources" by Tingay et al., is currently in press at the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. The paper contains VSOP images of 14 compact extragalactic Southern Hemisphere radio sources, with full descriptions of the observations, data reduction techniques, and parameters of the resulting images and model-fits. The images provide the highest resolution information to date for many of these objects. Comparisons are made between VSOP and previous ground-based VLBI results, including images from data extracted from the geodetic VLBI archive at the United States Naval Observatory. No evidence is found for obvious differences between the brightness temperature distributions of gamma-ray-loud and gamma-ray-quiet radio loud AGN, or for strong correlations between brightness temperature and spectral index, radio polarisation, flux density, or month-timescale modulation index. Detailed investigations, using data from the literature and the current work, are made for a sub-set of sources, including PKS 1127-145 and PKS 1718-649 (the nearest GHz-peaked spectrum radio galaxy).

                Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi