What is the brightest star that SIM can work on without degradation in its performance? How does the performance degrade for stars brighter than this?
(updated March 23, 2000) SIM maintains its astrometric accuracy for bright stars to a limit of V = 0 mag. For stars brighter than this limit, the performance degrades very rapidly due to detector saturation, and is almost impossible to quantify. Question 13: What is the Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) budget for SIM likely to be? This is relevant especially to the E/PO Scientist position, for developing an E/PO program which is commensurate with the available budget. Answer: Typically NASA Office of Space Science would like like to have the E/PO effort to be between 1% and 2% of the mission costs averaged over the mission lifetime. Taking a conservative view of SIM mission costs, and the lifetime, somewhere between $ 5 million and $ 10 million over roughly 10 years will be spent on the SIM E/PO program. This includes efforts by the ISDC, the SIM project itself, and by the Key Science teams and mission scientists.
