News

On behalf of everyone at the Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC we would like to wish you, your family and colleagues, a happy, peaceful and safe festive season and new year 2023.

Observing proposals are invited for the European VLBI Network (EVN). The deadline for proposal submission is 1 February 2023 at 16:00 UTC. See the Call for Proposals text here for full information about the call and how to submit proposals.

Dear colleagues, After almost 6 years in JIVE (5 as director), the time has come for me to step down and move to new projects. Coming to JIVE has been one of the best decisions of my life, it has allowed me to work with very talented people, in an intense international context. I learnt a lot. We engaged in many different activities which delivered together successfully, to highlight a few, the review in 2018, the EVN Science Vision 2020-2030, new correlator modes (multi-phase centers, pulsars, etc), enhanced user support (update of EVN users guide, EVN support+, ERIS and CASA-VLBI workshops, etc), many science and R&D projects, VLBI advocacy, etc.

The 2023 CASA VLBI Workshop organised by JIVE will be held on 5-9 June 2023 as an hybrid event in Dwingeloo (the Netherlands) and online. Registration is now open and the deadline for abstract submission is 24 March 2023.

 

The RADIOBLOCKS project, coordinated by JIVE ERIC and including major European research infrastructures for radio astronomy, together with partners from industry and academia, has been granted 10 M€ by the European Commission to develop “common building blocks” for technological solutions beyond state-of-the-art, that will enable a broad range of new science and enhance European scientific competitiveness. The RADIOBLOCKS project will start on 1 March 2023.

On 1 December 2022, JIVE concluded its Gender Equality Plan, which will contribute towards improving the diversity in the organisation as well as establishing a fairer and safer work environment.

The Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (JIVE) and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) announce up to 7 grants for students to participate in the ASTRON/JIVE 2023 Summer Research Programme. Deadline for applications is 1 February 2023 23:59 CET.

On 17-19 October 2022, JIVE and ASTRON co-hosted the 3rd Next Generation VLBI workshop (ngSVLBI-3) in Dwingeloo, the Netherlands. The hybrid workshop was attended both in-person and remotely by about 90 participants from all over the world.

On Wednesday 26 October JIVE joined many of Europe's biggest facilities in physics-related disciplines cementing a long-term deal to commit to sharing and processing open data. This agreement was presented at the “ESCAPE to the Future” conference where partners of the H2020 ESCAPE project as well as members of the scientific community and the European Commission gathered at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science in Brussels (Belgium).

The CASA package is now capable of calibrating the majority of VLBI observations. The new tasks and functionalities to process and calibrate VLBI observations - whose implementation has been led by JIVE - are described in a paper published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP) journal. In addition to a description of the software, a comparison with AIPS processing is included, demonstrating the results are virtually identical. This paper appears jointly with the new CASA reference paper, which gives a high-level overview of the entire CASA package.