Extension of the Optical Reference Frame:Space Based

At its 23rd General Assembly, Kyoto 1997, the IAU decided that the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) should be defined by the positions of 608 compact extragalactic radio sources (Ma & Feissel 1997), with the Hipparcos Catalogue (ESA 1997) being its practical realization at optical wavelengths. Although the Hipparcos instrument was unable to observe the defining sources of the ICRF directly in the optical regime, it is linked to the ICRF via a number of auxiliary observations (Kovalevsky et al. 1997). The Hipparcos Catalogue is the first celestial reference frame which is constructed from observations not made from the surface of the Earth.