<h2>AAS 95-384</h2><h2>The Calibration and Characterization of IRAS Metric Resident Space Object Detections</h2><h4>M. T. Lane, J. Baldassini and E. M. Gaposchkin, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA</h4><h2> Abstract </h2>The InfraRed Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) was launched and operated during a 10 month period in 1983.  The science data were collected in a mode where the focal plane was always pointing directly away from the Earth.  The Space Research Institute at Groningen, Netherlands collected approximately 139,000 tracks of data which had focal plane motion different than astronomical sources, and the IRAS Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) determined the boresite pointing of IRAS to within 20 arcseconds.  This report will focus on the non-astronomical detections from IRAS, of which many are Resident Space Objects (RSO).  In particular, the focus of the study is on the metric calibration and characterization of the RSO observations.  Supporting analysis tools, required corollary data, and the metric calibration procedure will be described, and results on the accuracy of the IRAS ephemeris and metric RSO detections will be presented.<br><br>