MegaPipe astrometry for the New Horizons spacecraft

Abstract

The New Horizons spacecraft, launched by NASA in 2006, will arrive in the Pluto-Charon system on July 14, 2015. There, it will spend a few hours imaging Pluto and its moons. It will then have a small amount of reserve propellant which will be used to direct the probe on to a second, yet to be discovered object in the Kuiper Belt. Data from the MegaPrime camera on CFHT was used to build a precise, high density astrometric reference frame for both the final approach into the Pluto system and the search for the secondary target. Pluto currently lies in the galactic plane. This is a hindrance in that there are potential problems with confusion. However, it is also a benefit, since it allows the use of the UCAC4 astrometric reference catalog, which is normally too sparse for use with MegaCam images. The astrometric accuracy of the final catalogs, as measured by the residuals, is 0.02 arcseconds.

arXiv comment7 pages, 5 figures, Published in Journal of Instrumentation as part of Precision Astronomy with Fully Depleted CCDS (PACCD2013)

References in corpus (5)

• The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
• The Fourth US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC4)
• MegaPipe: the MegaCam image stacking pipeline at the Canadian Astronomical Data Centre
• The New Horizons Pluto Kuiper belt Mission: An Overview with Historical Context
• Kuiper Belt Occultation Predictions

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Size and Shape Constraints of (486958) Arrokoth from Stellar Occultations
• High-Precision Orbit Fitting and Uncertainty Analysis of (486958) 2014 MU69