Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer: an optical astrometric survey mission

The Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer (FAME) is a MIDEX class Explorer mission designed to perform an all-sky, astrometric survey with unprecedented accuracy, determining the positions, parallaxes, proper motions, and photometry of 40 million stars. It will create a rigid, astrometric catalog of stars from an input catalog with 5 v v v < 15, FAME's goal is to determine positions and parallaxes accurate to < 500 (mu) as, with proper motion errors < 500 (mu) as/year. It will also collect photometric data on these 40 million stars in four Sloan DSS colors.