JIVE Annual Report 2020 now available

Published on 30 June 2021

The JIVE Annual Report 2020 is now available. It presents a summary of JIVE's many activities throughout the year. The contents include: 

  • Review of JIVE services and operations: COVID-19 Pandemic had only a minor impact on the operations of the European VLBI Network (EVN) thanks to the combined efforts of the JIVE and EVN staff.
  • Research and Development highlights: including direct involvement in very high impact VLBI science projects such as following up the mystery of Fast Radio Bursts and supporting in various ways the Event Horizon Telescope and its science goal of imaging of the environments around Black Holes. Other notable science achievements involving significant contributions from JIVE included studies of water maser super-bursts and the processing of orbiting VLBI data to obtain high-resolution images of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), or supporting non-standard VLBI projects included supporting EVN observations of the Insight Lander on the surface of Mars. Furthermore, JIVE's software development and in-house expertise also contributes more generally to the world VLBI ‘ecosystem' to many relevant projects, amongst which contributions to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) in the framework of the H2020 ESCAPE project. Significant progress was made towards adding the EVN archive to the Virtual Observatory, providing a Jupyter notebook to do EVN continuum data reduction and a prototype "bring compute to the data" Jupyterhub platform where users can process EVN data using notebooks next to the EVN archive without having to download it to their own machine.
  • A summary of JIVE sustainability actions: JIVE member countries and collaborating organisations have committed to strongly support the sustainability of JIVE by increasing their funding contributions for the coming four-year period (2021-2024). The participation in EC projects, in particular the new H2020 OPTICON-RadioNet Pilot project, establishes also a firm stable financial basis for JIVE's work programme in the coming years. Moreover, the publication of the EVN Science Vision outlining the prospects for high impact VLBI science during the coming decade was an important milestone during the year. Following on from this vision document JIVE staff have been leaders in starting the development of the EVN technical roadmap to convert the science vision into reality.

Additional information

The Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (JIVE) has as its primary mission to operate and develop the EVN data processor, a powerful supercomputer that combines the signals from radio telescopes located across the planet. Founded in 1993, JIVE is since 2015 a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), currently with seven member countries: France, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain and Sweden; additional support is received from partner institutes in China, Germany and South Africa. JIVE is hosted by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) in the Netherlands.

Links

Download the JIVE Annual Report 2020 here.

Contact

Francisco Colomer
JIVE Director
colomer@jive.eu

Jorge Rivero González
JIVE Science Communications Officer
rivero@jive.eu