The SIM Lite Astrometric Observatory: Opportunities for General Observers

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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The SIM Lite Astrometric Observatory is a space mission dedicated to precision astrometry. It will have a single-measurement accuracy of 1 microarcsecond (µas) and a noise floor below 0.035 µas, enabling a search for Earth-like planets around several dozen of the nearest stars. For parallax and proper motions, it will provide positions and parallaxes accurate to 4 µas for targets down to V = 19 during its 5-year mission. Because it is a flexibly pointed instrument, the targets it selects can be based on astronomical selection criteria. It complements all-sky survey missions such as Gaia and JMAPS, and it will address topics that do not need a lot of targets for a scientifically significant result.
There will be an extensive General Observer (GO) program for SIM Lite, opening up this capability to a wide range of possible experiments. In this talk I will describe some possible opportunities, and use some of the experiments of the Science Team as illustrations of its planned use. The mission completed its technology development in 2005, and although the launch is still several years in the future, now is a good time to be thinking of experiments and laying the groundwork for novel experiments that fully utilize this fundamental measurement capability.
The research described in this talk was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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