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J. Catanzarite, M. Shao (Caltech/JPL), D. Ciardi, A. Wehrle (CalTech)
The Space Interferometry Mission requires an astrometric grid of over a thousand bright (V~12) stars distributed quasi-uniformly on the celestial sphere. Grid star candidates currently consist of several thousand K giants at a distance of 1 or 2 kiloparsecs. SIM grid stars must be astrometrically stable to better than 4 microarcseconds over the nominal five-year mission in order to provide a reference frame for SIM's high-precision astrometric measurements.
The presence of stellar or planetary companions could render a grid star candidate astrometrically unstable and therefore unfit for the grid. Using Monte Carlo simulations, and a priori information about binarity of solar-type stars, we investigate the effectiveness of screening SIM grid star candidates via three or four radial velocity measurements over four years. We determine the required radial velocity measurement precision for this filtering scheme.
This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/SIM/sim_index.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: jcat@s383.jpl.nasa.gov
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.