OmniUV: A Multi-Purpose Simulation Toolkit for VLBI Observation

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.