Building an astrometric reference frame for tests of General Relativity with stellar orbits at the Galactic center with HST and GAIA

The short-period star S0-2 will reach its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center in 2018 at a separation of < 120 AU. This event will offer the first of a series of tests of General Relativity with stellar orbits around a supermassive black hole, an unexplored regime for tests of gravity. While S0-2 has been monitored for over 20 years with high angular resolution measurements from the ground, the astrometric reference frame is currently not stable enough for GR tests. The current reference frame is constructed using observations of 7 radio masers with narrow-field adaptive optics imaging from the ground. While this method provides a reference frame that is stable enough to measure the Keplerian orbits, it does not meet the more stringent requirements needed to measure post-Newtonian effects such as the precession of the periapse of the orbit. The small number of reference stars and the systematic errors associated with using large mosaics to observe these stars limit the accuracy of this method. We propose to construct a new reference frame for tests of gravity with WFC3-IR observations in Cycles 25, 26, & 27. When combined with absolute positions and proper motions from GAIA, these observations will provide the required precision in the reference frame. The WFC3-IR field of view has over 1000 times greater areal coverage than the narrow-field AO observations, providing 3 times the number of absolute reference sources from GAIA. The proposed observations build on a legacy of HST, GAIA, and adaptive optics data to open an era of gravitational science with orbits at the Galactic center.