CARR ASTRONAUTICS CORP — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: The most up-to-date measurements of astronomical sources are accessible through the Virtua

Description

The most up-to-date measurements of astronomical sources are accessible through the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO), which is constantly fed by ongoing modern sky surveys while also having access to older static catalogs. We propose to produce a software package that will leverage the ever expanding and improving data accessible through the VAO to aid in cataloging and classifying astronomical sources to create the integrated database called for in the topic. Implementing the package as a front-end that interfaces with the VAO will ensure these classifications are based on the most recent and best measurements available. Then, based on those classifications, the package will assign an appropriate synthetic model of the UV-IR Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) for the stellar sources. Another innovation is that the proposed system will use SEDs from the ATLAS stellar atmosphere models, which provide more realistic representations of the stellar flux than black-body models.