Improving HST Pointing & Absolute Astrometry

Details Improving HST Pointing & Absolute Astrometry Improving HST Pointing & Absolute Astrometry

May 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...210.8602l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 210, #86.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.194

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Scientific paper

Accurate absolute astrometry is becoming increasingly important in an era of multi-mission archives and virtual observatories. Hubble Space Telescope's (HST's) Guidestar Catalog II (GSC2) has reduced coordinate error to around 0.25 arcsecond, a factor 2 or more compared with GSC1. With this reduced catalog error, special attention must be given to calibrate and maintain the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs) and Science Instruments (SIs) alignments in HST to a level well below this in order to ensure that the accuracy of science product's astrometry keywords and target positioning are limited only by the catalog errors. After HST Servicing Mission 4, such calibrations' improvement in "blind" pointing accuracy will allow for more efficient COS acquisitions.
Multiple SIs and FGSs each have their own footprints in the spatially shared HST focal plane. It is the small changes over time in primarily the whole-body positions & orientations of these instruments & guiders relative to one another that is addressed by this work. We describe the HST Cycle 15 program CAL/OTA 11021 which, along with future variants of it, determines and maintains positions and orientations of the SIs and FGSs to better than 50 milli- arcseconds and 0.04 to 0.004 degrees of roll, putting errors associated with the alignment sufficiently below GSC2 errors.
We present recent alignment results and assess their errors, illustrate trends, and describe where and how the observer sees benefit from these calibrations when using HST.

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