In the International VLBI Service (IVS) Newsletter Issue 22 of December 2008, Dirk Behrend, the IVS Coordinating Center Director, notes:
"The scarcest resource continues to be station observing time. So it was bad news during the planning discussions to hear that Hartebeesthoek, South Africa suffered a major failure of a polar shaft bearing and will likely be down for the entire observing year. We hope that a repair or replacement of the bearing will be possible on a faster time scale, but this seems unlikely at the time of writing. With HartRAO being one of the few southern hemisphere stations, several IVS observing series will have a weaker geometry and are strongly impacted. The biggest impact, in this context, will be on the ICRF sessions with emphasis on the southern hemisphere (CRF deep-south), where no adequate replacement station is available."