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Session 23 - Science with the Space Interferometry Mission.
Oral session, Wednesday, January 07
International Ballroom Center,
The Decade Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics in the 1990s recommended the development of an interferometric mission to ``...achieve a 1000 fold improvement in our ability to measure celestial positions.'' The design goal was to measure positions of widely separated objects to visual magnitude 20 with an accuracy of 30 microarcseconds. Our futuristic hope was that the mission might achieve 3 microacrseconds. The design concept adopted by the NASA for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) brilliantly fulfills these scientific goals. The precision provided by SIM promises to open up a vast new frontier of scientific problems.
