Pointing Refinement of SIRTF Images

Abstract

The soon-to-be-launched Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) shall produce image data with an a-posteriori pointing knowledge of 1.4 arcsec (1 sigma radial) with a goal of 1.2 arcsec in the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS). To perform robust image coaddition, mosaic generation, extraction and position determination of faint sources, the pointing will need to be refined to better than a few-tenths of an arcsecond. We use a linear-sparse matrix solver to find a "global-minimization" of all relative image offsets in a mosaic from which refined pointings and orientations can be computed. This paper summarizes the pointing-refinement algorithm and presents the results of testing on simulated data.