COMMISSION 8: ASTROMETRY

Extract

Gaia is continuing well with its development and construction and is expected to achieve parallax accuracies of about 10 to 300 μas for 6 to 20 mag. It is scheduled to launch in 2013.

The ICRF2 was adopted by the IAU in 2009 as the new fundamental celestial reference frame.

The UCAC project concluded with the publication of its 4th data release (all-sky, over 100 million stars).

The JASMINE project will launch the Nano-JASMINE satellite in 2012 and continues with the development of its other satellites which will complement the Gaia project.

The PPMXL (Heidelberg) and XPM (Ukraine) catalogues provide improved astrometric accuracies from new reductions of USNO-B (USNO-A) and 2MASS data.

It is disappointing that the SIM project was cancelled during this triennium. It would have further complemented the above two satellite projects and would have gone even beyond Gaia in astrometric accuracy.