OmniUV: A Multi-Purpose Simulation Toolkit for VLBI Observation

TL;DR

OmniUV is a versatile simulation toolkit designed for space and ground VLBI observations, supporting diverse station types and enabling trajectory, uv calculation, visibility simulation, and image reconstruction.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, extendable simulation framework for VLBI that supports various station configurations, including space-based and lunar stations, which was not available before.

Findings

Successfully simulated space VLBI network scenarios

Demonstrated wide field array applications

Toolkit is publicly available and extendable

Abstract

We present OmniUV, a multi-purpose simulation toolkit for space and ground VLBI observations. It supports various kinds of VLBI stations, including Earth (ground) fixed, Earth orbit, Lunar fixed, Lunar orbit, Moon-Earth and Earth-Sun Lagrange 1 and 2 points, etc. The main functionalities of this toolkit are: (1) Trajectory calculation; (2) Baseline uv calculation, by taking the vailability of each station into account; (3) Visibility simulation for the given uv distribution, source structure and system noise; (4) Image and beam reconstruction. Two scenarios, namely space VLBI network and wide field array, are presented as demonstrations of the toolkit applications in completely different scales. OmniUV is the acronym of "Omnipotent UV". We hope it could work as a general framework, in which various kinds of stations could be easily incorporated and the functionalities could be further extended. The toolkit has been made publicly available.