RECONS Mission Statement

The purpose of RECONS is to understand the nature of the Sun's nearest stellar neighbors, both individually and as a population. Our current primary goals are to discover ``missing'' members of the sample of stars within 10 parsecs (32.6 light years), and to characterize all stars within that distance limit. New members are found via astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic techniques, or through companionship studies at small and large separations. Characterization includes photometry and spectroscopy at both optical and infrared wavelengths, as well as determinations of the luminosity function, mass function, and multiplicity fraction of the nearby stars. In the future, the RECONS effort will expand to further distances.