SC 1.4: Interaction of Celestial and Terrestrial Reference Frames

Chair: Zinovy Malkin (Russia)

Terms of Reference

International terrestrial and celestial reference frames, ITRF and ICRF, respectively, as well as the tie between them expressed by the Earth Orientation parameters (EOP) are key products of geodesy and astrometry. The requirements to all the components of this triad grow steadily and the mm/μas level of accuracy is the current goal of the astronomic and geodetic community. The current computation procedures for ITRF and ICRF are based on multi-stage processing of observations made with several space geodetic techniques: VLBI, SLR, GNSS, and DORIS. Not all of them provide equal contributions to the final products. The latest ITRF realizations have been derived from combination of normal equations obtained from all four techniques, whereas the ICRF is a result of a single global VLBI solution. The latter is tied to the ITRF using an arbitrary set of reference stations. But VLBI relies on the ITRF origin provided by satellite techniques and shares responsibility with SLR for the ITRF scale. And all the techniques contribute to positions and velocities of ITRF stations. This situation causes complicated mutual impact of ITRF and ICRF, which should be carefully investigated in order to improve the accuracy of both reference systems and the consistency between each other and EOP. The subject becomes more and more complicated when moving to millimeter accuracy in all components of this fundamental triad. As a consequence, we face systematic errors involving the connection between the ICRF and ITRF realizations, which cannot be fixed by datum correction during the current solution.

Objectives

Several issues are currently preventing the realization of the terrestrial and celestial reference systems (TRF and CRF, respectively) at the mm/μas level of accuracy, such as: (a) insufficient number and non- optimal distribution of active and stable (systematically and physically) stations (VLBI and SLR in the first place) and radio sources, (b) technological (precision) limitations of existing techniques, (c) incompleteness of the theory and models, and (d) not fully understood and agreed-upon details of the processing strategy. These issues are the subject of research of the IAG Sub-Commission 1.4.

Working Groups of Sub-Commission 1.4

WG 1.4.1: Improving and unification of geophysical and astronomical modeling for better consistency of reference frames
Chair: Daniel MacMillan (USA)

WG 1.4.2: Improving VLBI-based ICRF and comparison with Gaia-CRF
Chair: Sébastien Lambert (France)

JWG 1.4.3: Consistent realization of TRF, CRF, and EOP
(joint with IAU Commission A2 and IERS)
Chair: Robert Heinkelmann (Germany)
Vice-Chair: Manuela Seitz (Germany)