"These results are very significant for the advance of radio astronomy," said JIVE director Huib Jan van Langevelde. "It shows not only that telescopes of the future can be developed in worldwide collaboration, but that they can also be operated as truly global instruments."

EXPReS, funded by the European Commission, aims to connect up to 16 of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes to the JIVE processor to correlate VLBI data in real time. This replaces the traditional VLBI method of shipping data on disk and provides astronomers with observational data in a matter of hours rather than weeks, allowing them to respond rapidly to transient events with follow-up observations.

That's kick ass innovation. World cooperation... ain't it nice?