Space Astrometry and the HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera

The launch of the Hipparcos spacecraft marked the beginning of space astrometry. Hopefully, this will be followed in the near future by the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is not primarily an astrometric instrument, but has astrometric capabilities which will be described in this paper. In addition, there are plans and proposals for future astrometric spacecraft. These include the launch of a radio antenna, which combined with Earth-based antennae would provide a very, very long base line interferometer (Levy, 1986, 1988). There are proposals for launching optical interferometers, such as POINTS (Reasenberg et al 1988). There are also proposals by York and Gatewood (Gatewood et al., 1986; Gatewood 1987, 1989) for launching astrometric instruments using gratings and detectors. Thus, the future holds the prospects for a whole new capability in the field of astrometry.

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