Stable radio sources and reference frame

Abstract

International audienceThe analysis of geodetic VLBI sessions since the early days of VLBI allows one to get time series of radio source coordinates. The analysis of these time series in terms of time stability can help us in our quest for a subset of radio sources suitable for defining the axes of the next ICRF. What we do here is (i) to compute the time series, (ii) to select the most stable sources, and (iii) to assess that the reference frame as defined with these sources is more stable than the previously defined ICRF