Current status of Chinese VLBI network software correlator

Zheng Weimin, Shu Fengchun, Luo Wuchao, Yu Yun, Wang Weihua

VLBI Department, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, CAS, P.R.China

Oral presentation

Supported by CE-1, the Chinese first lunar exploration project, a specific VLBI software correlator of the Chinese VLBI network (CVN) has been finished. It has worked for more than one year to support the CE-1 critical mission and the long term operation mission with the hardware correlator. In December 2008, CE-1 explorer achieved an orbit transfer and the orbit altitude was changed form 200 Km to 100Km. With the upgraded fringe search module, the software correlator successfully fulfilled all the VLBI data correlation in near real time.
To meet the near future requirements of CVN in the deep space, the geodesy and astronomy domains, R&D activities of the software correlator technologies were carried out. In Jan. 6 2009, on the baseline of Shanghai-Urumqi, the first CVN 2-station high speed e-VLBI (256Mbps/station) experiment was conducted by a high speed 10-station software correlator prototype running on a computer cluster. The output format transform software for geodesy and astronomy applications was also being developed.