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No, just before they used tapes (VLBA), or harddisk packs (EVN), so instantantious is in comparison with shipping the data with UPS and having to wait a week for it to arrive.

See http://www.jive.nl/ [www.jive.nl] for all the details and http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=2007 0906 [astron.nl] for some images.

The big difference with how the VLBA operates and how the EVN (european VLBI network) operates, is that this was done in real time, so called e-VLBI. No tapes, no harddisk packs, but live lightpaths across the globe.

See http://www.jive.nl/ for all the details and http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=2007 0906 for some images.

Is here while images are here

The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) has reported that the Huygens signal has been picked up by several Radio Telescopes on the ground. There was already a plan in place to investigate the Doppler on the signal to learn about Huygens' descent profile.
Also, the most recent ESA press conference on Huygens stated that they are trying to recover data from the ground telescopes (which they are now referring to as Channel C), although it was unclear if this would be just the signal's Doppler or actually decoding some of the lost data stream.

There's also an interview with Dr. Hayley Bignall, [...], where he discusses [...].

He? I know astrophysicist is a male-dominated profession. But a name like 'Hayley' should at the very least make one wonder. See this page to accurately determine Dr. Bignall's gender.

Furthermore, this is nothing really new; see this /. story, amongst others.

Still, it's a very creative way of increasing resolution! Not to mention difficult and time-consuming. I wonder how believable the results are. I use a similar technique (called Speckle Masking) to eliminate earth-atmosphere scintillation from Solar observations, with astounding results. These, however, can be checked against single 'lucky shot' images of extrodinary quality or observations from space...

Cheers,

Alfred

Interferometry is a fairly well understood area of astronomy and similar sites are already in use for radio astronomy. I am familiar with a few VLBI related projects:

- The European VLBI network has useful information on their website.

- the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, JIVE, also has some good info.

- Similar work is being done in the United States at various sites including (the one that I am most familiar with) work at the MIT Haystack Observatory.

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"They said there's too much caffeine in your bloodstream"

though not necessarily capable of the highest resolution (the USA's Very Large Baseline Interferometer currently holds that record).
Bzzz. Wrong. Typical american inward looking attitude. The VLBA (Very Large Baseline ARRAY) does VLBI (Very LONG Baseline Interferometry) combined with the European VLBI Network (EVN) to make a telescope the size of the Earths diameter. But even this is not good enough, the Japanese VSOP project does VLBI between Earth based telescopes and a radio telescope in orbit.
http://www.jive.nl/jive/evn
http://www.vsop.isas.ac.jp