ACCESS - Absolute Color Calibration Experiment for Standard Stars
Abstract
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.- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2005
- Bibcode:
- 2005AAS...20717312K