The A+ Configuration

These enhancements involve the development of new infrastructure at locations away from the VLA Site:

• New antennas to provide now-unavailable baselines between those in the VLA and in the VLBA. To maintain VLA-like imaging fidelity, of order eight new stations will be be required.
• Fiber-optic links between the VLA and the inner VLBA antennas, and between the VLA and the proposed new antennas, to provide for real-time data correlation with the upgraded correlator.

When the VLA antennas are not in the A-configuration, the new antennas can either be part of an expanded VLBA, (where the eight new antennas will enormously increase the imaging capability of that array), or they can run as a standalone array with excellent sensitivity and imaging performance on a scale ten times finer than the VLA can currently achieve in its A-configuration.

Linkages to the innermost VLBA antennas and the new antennas will increase the maximum angular resolution by a factor of about ten. The sensitivity increases will allow this increased angular resolution to be exploited fully when observing a wide (and in many cases for the first time, representative) variety of thermal and nonthermal objects, both galactic and extragalactic.