OmniUV: A Multipurpose Simulation Toolkit for VLBI Observation

Abstract

Abstract We present OmniUV, a multipurpose 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 availability 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 the space VLBI network and the wide-field array, are presented as the application of the toolkit at 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.