Access: Absolute Color Calibration Experiment For Standard Stars

ACCESS is a recently approved rocket-borne payload with a ground-based calibration and performance monitoring program that is designed to transfer the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) absolute laboratory standards to the stars with a precision and calibration accuracy of 1% across the 0.35 - 1.7 mu m bandpass. This represents a significant, improvement in the absolute and relative astrophysical flux calibration system, particularly at near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths.Establishing improved spectrophotometric standards is important for a broad range of missions and is relevant to many astrophysical problems. In particular, the precise calibration of the flux scale across the bandpass extending from 0.35-1.7 mu m is fundamental to the precise determination of dark energy measurements based on SNeIa photometry.