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S. Salim, A. Gould (Ohio State University), R. Olling (USNO)
We explore what the Full-Sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer (FAME) can achieve by observing a ``small'' (< 106) sample of faint objects (R\lesssim18) in addition to its standard R<15 magnitude limited catalog of 40\times 106 stars.
Observing some 50,000 quasars will improve the accuracy of the reference frame from 16 micro-as/yr to 6 micro-as/yr, allowing proper motion of the Galactic center due to reflex of the Sun's motion to be determined with an accuracy of 0.1%. It will also permit very accurate proper motions of the Magellanic Clouds. Quasar observations also offer a powerful check on any unmodeled parallax systematics.
Proper motions of 30,000 faint field blue horizontal branch stars will allow stellar halo rotation to be mapped to beyond 35 kpc. Halo substructures producing clumps in the velocity space will be detectable to 10 kpc.
In addition to this, allowing inclusion of objects with R>15 will increase the number of good parallaxes of late M-dwarfs 30-fold, and provide distances of over 200 L-dwarfs. FAME could obtain good (10%) parallaxes for 3700 white dwarfs, a 10-fold increase over the R<15 sample. These parallaxes will yield precise mass and luminosity functions.
Candidate quasars, BHB stars, and nearby stars will be selected from existing and planned surveys (SDSS, USNO, 2MASS, etc.) The total number of faint candidates should be about 500,000, a small fraction of the FAME input catalog.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: samir@astronomy.ohio-state.edu