Matera CGS VLBI Station

Abstract:  This report describes the status of the Matera VLBI station. Also an overview of the station, some technical characteristics of the system and staff addresses are given. precision ranging observations of several satellites. The new Matera Laser Ranging Observatory (MLRO), one of the most advanced Satellite and Lunar Laser Ranging facilities in the world, has been installed in 2002 and replaced the old SLR system. CGS hosted also mobile SLR systems MTLRS (Holland/Germany) and TLRS-1 (NASA). In May 1990 the CGS extended its capabilities to Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) installing a 20-m radiotelescope. Since then, Matera performed 761 sessions up to December 2007. In 1991 we started GPS activities, participating in the GIG 91 experiment installing in Matera a permanent GPS Rogue receiver. In 1994 six TurboRogue SNR 8100 receivers were purchased in order to create the Italian Space Agency GPS fiducial network (IGFN). At the moment 12 stations are part of the IGFN and all data from these stations, together with 24 other stations in Italy, are archived and made available by the CGS WWW server GeoDAF (http://geodaf.mt.as i.it). Thanks to the co-location of all precise positioning space based techniques (VLBI, SLR, LLR and GPS), CGS is one of the few fundamental stations in the world. With the objective of exploiting the maximum integration in the field of Earth observations, in the late 1980s ASI extended CGS involvement also to remote sensing activities for present and future missions (ERS- 1, ERS-2, X-SAR/SIR-C, SRTM, ENVISAT, COSMO-SkyMed).