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Paper: Photometry with GAIA
Volume: 364, The Future of Photometric, Spectrophotometric, and Polarimetric Standardization
Page: 215
Authors: Jordi, C.; Carrasco, J.M.
Abstract: The ESA GAIA spacecraft has been approved for launch by a Soyuz-Fregat launcher in December 2011. After five years continuously scanning the sky, astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data for a billion objects down to V ~ 20 will be acquired. That huge survey of the Galaxy content and beyond will provide insights to the origin and evolution of the Galaxy, to stellar astrophysics, to solar system objects, to QSOs, and so on. GAIA is the successor of the successful HIPPARCOS mission and it means a big step forward, both in terms of number of objects and in terms of precision.
The final industrial approach to photometry includes two slitless spectrographs, covering the blue and the red parts of the radiation spectrum from 330 to 1050 nm. Photometry will be acquired by a white photometric band, and by two low-dispersion spectra. Now, there is a unique focal plane integrating astrometry, photometry and spectroscopy.
In this paper, we review the goals of GAIA photometry, and present as well the new low-dispersion spectrophotometry approach. With the redesign of the mission, the reduction process changes considerably and a great effort must be devoted to this issue in the next years.
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