VLBI2010 Imaging and Structure Corrections

Simulations show that the next generation VLBI system is generally well suited for imaging extragalactic radio sources. In addition to revealing the morphology of the sources, simulated VLBI2010 images may also be used to generate structure correction maps, which characterize the impact of source structure on the VLBI measurements. By comparing structure corrections for a set of simulated images based on Monte-Carlo generated visibilities with theoretical structure corrections derived from the model, we assess the accuracy of VLBI2010 structure corrections. In the most favorable case (32-station network, source at declination +40 deg.), statistics demonstrate that the structure corrections obtained from simulated images are statistically close to the theoretical model ones, which seems very promising for the VLBI2010 system.