American Institute of Physics. Center for History of Physics. Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations. Phase III: Ground-Based Astronomy, Materials Science, Heavy-Ion and Nuclear Physics, Medical Physics, and Computer-Mediated Collaborations.

A documentation research project to study the complex issues facing the historical documentation of multi-institutional collaborations in physics and allied sciences. Phase III focused on four disciplinary areas of ground-based astronomy, materials science, heavy-ion physics, and medical physics, and a category named computer-mediated collaborations. The 3 MM VLBI was an effort of the California Institute of Technology (Owens Valley Radio Observatory), the University of California, Berkeley (Hat Creek Observatory), MIT (Haystack Observatory), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Massachusetts, and Onsala (Sweden) Space Observatory to demonstrate the feasibility of VLBI at order-of-magnitude lower wavelengths than previously used. The collaboration has around 20 participants and no physical location. The collaboration itself was not explicitly funded, but American participants and organizations individually had funding from NSF, NASA, and the California Space Institute. The collaboration has disbanded but can reconstitute itself. All data were taken in 1981.