STARCaL: A Tunable Laser in Space for Telescope Calibration and Atmospheric Studies

Details STARCaL: A Tunable Laser in Space for Telescope Calibration and Atmospheric Studies STARCaL: A Tunable Laser in Space for Telescope Calibration and Atmospheric Studies

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...20916411a&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #164.11; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

We propose a tunable laser-based satellite-mounted spectrophotometric and absolute flux calibration system, to be utilized by groundand space-based telescopes. As uncertainties on the photometry, due to imperfect knowledge of both telescope optics and the atmosphere, will in the near future begin to dominate the uncertainties on fundamental cosmological parameters such as ΩΛ (Omega_Lambda) and w in measurements from SNIa, weak gravitational lensing, and baryon oscillations, a method for reducing such uncertainties is needed. We propose to improve spectrophotometric calibration, currently obtained using standard stars, by placing a tunable laser and a wide-angle light source on a satellite by early next decade (perhaps included in the upgrade to the GPS satellite network) to improve absolute flux calibration to the 0.02% level and relative spectrophotometric calibration to better than 0.001% across the visible and near-infrared spectrum. As well as fundamental astrophysical applications, the system proposed here potentially has broad utility for atmospheric physics, as well as for defense and national security applications such as ground target illumination, space situational awareness, and space communication.
For further details please see http://www.starcal.org/ and http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0604339.

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