Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC

The Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry European Research Infrastructure Consortium (JIVE) was established by a decision of the European Commission in December 2014, and assumed the activities and responsibilities of the JIVE foundation, which was established in December 1993.

JIVE's mandate is to support the operations and users of the European VLBI Network (EVN), in the widest sense.

Observations using the EVN can also be carried out in real-time, thus earning the name of e-VLBI (electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry).

Such high-speed networks eliminate the shipping of disks of data from separate observations for correlation, thus allowing astronomers to respond to events as they happen in real time.

In a demonstration of e-VLBI as part of 100 Hours of Astronomy[1] in 2009 14 telescopes from Australia, Chile, China, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden and the UK participated in joint observations of the active galaxy 3C120.