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A new network of faint calibration stars from NIRS/IRTS
Minoru M. Freund 1, 2 - Mikako Matsuura 1 - Hiroshi Murakami 1 - Martin Cohen 3 - Manabu Noda 4 - Shuji Matsuura 5 - Toshio Matsumoto 1
1 ISAS, 3-1-1 Yoshinodai, Sagamihara, Kanagawa 229, Japan -
2 NASA Ames Research Center, MS 239-4, Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000, USA -
3 Radio Astronomy Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA -
4 Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute, Nagoya, Japan -
5 Caltech, 139-74, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
We describe the network of stellar calibrators of the NIRS/IRTS, covering the spectral range between 1.4 to 4
m. The NIRS detectors were very stable in their
responsivity (to within a few %) during the whole mission,
allowing us to easily compare the in-flight, and the pre- and
post-flight laboratory measurements to determine the
beampattern and the absolute calibration of the NIRS. We have
validated the accuracy of the spectral shape and absolute
values of calibration stars provided by the NIRS/IRTS. The
primary calibrators are from a network of bright calibrated
templates, created from the same 183 templates provided to ISO
prelaunch. We expect to ultimately achieve self-consistent
absolute calibration levels of about 3% among these
calibrators, with important implications for a unified network
of calibrators for IRTS, ISO and future missions like SOFIA and
SIRTF. Finally, we discuss strategies to extract several
hundred new ``faint calibration stars" from the NIRS/IRTS data,
with a precision of order a few percent absolute.
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Postscript version