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M.E. Kaiser, W.V. Dixon, P.D. Feldman, J.W. Kruk, S.R. McCandliss, H.W. Moos, D.J. Sahnow (JHU), B.J. Rauscher, J.P. Gardner, R.A. Kimble, P.C. Schwartz, B.E. Woodgate (NASA/GSFC), R.C. Bohlin (STScI/AURA), S.E. Deustua (AAS), R. Kurucz (CfA), S Perlmutter (LBNL)
ACCESS is a proposed series of rocket-borne sub-orbital missions whose purpose is to establish a network of standard stars with absolute fluxes that are directly traceable to ground based laboratory standards maintained by NIST. Our goal is to obtain an absolute spectrophotometric calibration accuracy of <1% in the 0.35-1.7 micron bandpass at a spectral resolution of greater than 500. This represents a significant improvement in the absolute calibration in the NIR bandpass. This fundamental astrophysics experiment will establish the first links in a chain of stellar calibrators including standard stars (10th magnitude) observable by major telescopes, thus enabling the ultimate calibration to extend to faint magnitudes.
This calibration program is important for a broad range of missions and relevant to many astrophysical problems. In particular, it is fundamental to photometrically based dark energy missions which use supernova type Ia.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #4
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.