Hipparcos satellite in the Large Solar Simulator, ESTEC, February 1988
|Organization||European Space Agency|
|Major contractors||Matra Marconi Space, Alenia Spazio|
|Launch date||8 August 1989|
|Launch site||Kourou, French Guiana|
|Launch vehicle||Ariane 4 (V33)|
|Mission length||3.5 years
Mission end: March 1993
|Mass||1,140 kg (2,513 lb) at launch|
|Type of orbit||Geostationary transfer orbit|
|Orbit height||507 to 35,888 km|
|Orbit period||10 hours 40 min|
|Focal length||1.4 m (4.6 ft)|
Hipparcos was a scientific satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 1989 and operated until 1993. It was the first space experiment devoted to precision astrometry, the accurate measurement of the positions of celestial objects on the sky. This permitted the accurate determination of proper motions and parallaxes of stars, allowing a determination of their distance and tangential velocity. When combined with radial-velocity measurements from spectroscopy, this pinpointed all six quantities needed to determine the motion of stars. The resulting Hipparcos Catalogue, a high-precision catalogue of more than 118,200 stars, was published in 1997. The lower-precision Tycho Catalogue of more than a million stars was published at the same time, while the enhanced Tycho-2 Catalogue of 2.5 million stars was published in 2000.
The word "Hipparcos" is an acronym for "High precision parallax collecting satellite" and also a reference to the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Nicaea, who is noted for applications of trigonometry to astronomy and his discovery of the precession of the equinoxes.
- 1 Background
- 2 Satellite and payload
- 3 Principles
- 4 Development, launch and operations
- 5 Hipparcos Input Catalogue
- 6 Data reductions
- 7 The Hipparcos reference frame
- 8 Double and multiple stars
- 9 Photometric observations
- 10 Radial velocities
- 11 Published catalogues
- 12 Scientific results
- 13 People
- 14 See also
- 15 References
- 16 External links
By the second half of the 20th century, the accurate measurement of star positions from the ground was running into essentially insurmountable barriers to improvements in accuracy, especially for large-angle measurements and systematic terms. Problems were dominated by the effects of the Earth's atmosphere, but were compounded by complex optical terms, thermal and gravitational instrument flexures, and the absence of all-sky visibility. A formal proposal to make these exacting observations from space was first put forward in 1967.
Although originally proposed to the French space agency CNES, it was considered too complex and expensive for a single national programme. Its acceptance within the European Space Agency's scientific programme, in 1980, was the result of a lengthy process of study and lobbying. The underlying scientific motivation was to determine the physical properties of the stars through the measurement of their distances and space motions, and thus to place theoretical studies of stellar structure and evolution, and studies of galactic structure and kinematics, on a more secure empirical basis. Observationally, the objective was to provide the positions, parallaxes, and annual proper motions for some 100,000 stars with an unprecedented accuracy of 0.002 arcseconds, a target in practice eventually surpassed by a factor of two. The name of the space telescope, "Hipparcos" was an acronym for High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite, and it also reflected the name of the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who is considered the founder of trigonometry and the discoverer of the precession of the equinoxes (due to the Earth wobbling on its axis).
Satellite and payload
The spacecraft carried a single all-reflective, eccentric Schmidt telescope, with an aperture of 29 cm (11.4 in). A special beam-combining mirror superimposed two fields of view, 58 degrees apart, into the common focal plane. This complex mirror consisted of two mirrors tilted in opposite directions, each occupying half of the rectangular entrance pupil, and providing an unvignetted field of view