The impact of CCD radiation damage on Gaia astrometry - I. Image location estimation in the presence of radiation damage

The Gaia mission has been designed to perform absolute astrometric measurements with un-precedented accuracy; the end-of-mission parallax standard error is required to be of the order of 10 micro-arcseconds for the brightest stars (V 6 10) and 30 micro-arcseconds for a G2V type star of magnitude 15. These requirements set a stringent constraint on the accuracy of the estimation of the location of the stellar image on the CCD for each observation: e.g., 0.3 milli-arseconds (mas) or 0.005 pixels for the same V = 15 G2V star. However the Gaia CCDs will suffer from charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) caused by radiation damage that will degrade the stellar image quality and may degrade the astrometric performance of Gaia if not properly addressed. For the first time at this level of detail, the potential impact of radiation damage on the performance of Gaia is investigated. In this first paper we focus on the evaluation of the CTI impact on the image location accuracy using a large set of CTI-free and damaged syn-thetic Gaia observations supported by experimental test results. We show that CTI decreases the stellar image signal-to-noise ratio and irreversibly degrades the image location estimation precision. As a consequence the location estimation standard errors increase by up to 6 % in