The Kashima 26-m antenna, which was constructed in 1968 as a facility of
the Communications Research Laboratory (now NICT), made considerable achievements
in such pioneering techniques as space communication experiments or observations
of plate motions by VLBI.
After being transferred to GSI in 1992, the antenna has been a major GSI's player for numbers of international geodetic VLBI observations. Especially in shifting the national reference to the global common geodetic reference system with a revision of the Survey Act in April 2002, the antenna played a crucial role as the first reference point in calculating the new coordinates of GPS-based control points and triangulation points. In other words, we can say that the Kashima 26-m antenna determined the position of Japan in the world.
However, because of aging, GSI made a decision to dismantle this antenna.
The Kashima 26-m antenna brought the curtain down on its 34 years of great
activities at the end of 2002.
the beginning of the dismantling process
scene of removing reflector panels from the antenna
