AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 173 Instrumentation: Ground Based or Airbourne
Poster, Thursday, 9:20am-4:00pm, January 12, 2006, Exhibit Hall

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[173.12] ACCESS - Absolute Color Calibration Experiment for Standard Stars

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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