VSOP/HALCA international mission operation Original Research Article

We have operated the VSOP mission (Hirosawa 1998, Hirabayashi 1998) for more than one year, and have gotten many observational results using the many operational elements that make VSOP work as one large 30,000 km diameter telescope. Because this is a VLBI project, we need radio telescopes all over the world, as well as correlators. For space VLBI, we also must have tracking stations to receive and record the data from the space VLBI satellite, HALCA. In this paper, we introduce how we get the observation results using these operation elements. We summarize the data flow for basic HALCA operation.