Analysis of Hipparcos Measurements: Positions, Proper Motions, Parallaxes

Abstract

Using the first 12 months of HIPPARCOS mission data already reduced, a synthesis solution was obtained by both CERGA and ARI teams. The reduction includes two steps. In the first one the origins of individual reference circles are determined, thus constituting the HIPPARCOS celestial reference frame. This solution uses a subset of some 30 000 bright and evidently single stars in order to minimize possible corruptive effects on the system. In the second step, the abscissa measurements of all observed stars are substituted in the system and then processed star by star in a least squares adjustment providing the astrometric parameters (positions and parallaxes).The results of sphere solution and astrometric parameter determination are discussed. In this context error ellipses and internal errors are calculated. External errors are derived by comparison with suitable astrometric catalogues. Especially, for estimating the external errors of the HIPPARCOS measured FK5 stars the instrumental system was tied to the FK5 system by rigid rotations followed by comparisons of the positions with those of FK5. The mean internal errors of the HIPPARCOS positions of FK5 stars is 1.5 milliarcseconds (mas) while the standard deviation of the differences HIPPARCOS minus FK5 reaches 90 mas. For the 5022 measured parallaxes the mean internal and external errors are 3.8 mas and 16.7 mas, respectively. — The results of precision and comparisons with external data show that the accuracy predicted for the final catalogue can be reached.