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My name is Chopo Ma. My primary job these days seems to be in charge of NASA's geodetic VLBI program.
When NASA started in this area of space geodesy using VLBI, there were different questions that were really interesting to answer.
For example, whether plates like the North American plate and Europe, the continents were actually moving.
The questions now are fundamental metrics, so that from the space geodesy measurements we can develop a very precise terrestrial reference frame.
The ability to know on the Earth, from one place to another and from one time to another, how things are related: up, down, east, west, north, south.
And this is very important for measurements which are small in nature but take some time to measure properly,
like what happens with sea level rise, and whether it's uniform over the whole globe or not.
VLBI and the other techniques are working to make improvements to make these types of fundamental measurements,
to allow other science to be done more accurately and to make the interpretation more secure.
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