The Ground Based Optical Tracking campaign (GBOT) was founded to provide optical
astrometric data to be used to aid the reconstruction of Gaia’s orbit to a
precision required to fully correct for aberration and to determine precise
baselines for observations of small solar-system objects by Gaia. The requirements
are to know the velocity to 2.5 mm s, and the position to 150 m. This translates
to a requirement of one daily data set (daily = over the course of 24 hours) with
a positional error of 20 mas, which is the commitment of Gaia. Despite the
fact that Gaia turned out to be 3 mags fainter than the assumed 18 mag,
subsequent studies, both theoretical and based on observations, have proven
that GBOT can reach those aims in terms of precision. In terms of accuracy,
we are limited by the accuracy of the current reference frame, therefore the
commitment can only be reached after the data has been re-reduced with Gaia data
from the first or another early release.
GBOT utilises a small network of 2 m telescopes, the 2.5 m VST+OMEGACAM on Mount
Paranal in Chile, the 2 m Liverpool telescope on Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma,
Spain, and the 2 m Faulkes North and South which are based on Maui island
(Hawaii, USA) and Siding Spring in Australia. Generally data is obtained on a
daily basis, with a 5–7 night Full Moon gap. The GBOT data are reduced and stored
at the Observatoire de Paris in a Saada database. The GBOT programme is described
in detail in Altmann et al. (2014) and the reduction method and pipeline
software in Bouquillon et al. (2014).