We run numerical simulations of the disruption of satellite galaxies in a
Galactic potential to build up the entire stellar halo, in order to investigate
what the next generation of astrometric satellites will reveal by observing the
halo of the Milky Way. We generate artificial DIVA, FAME and GAIA halo
catalogues, in which we look for the signatures left by the accreted
satellites. We develop a method based on the standard Friends-of-Friends
algorithm applied to the space of integrals of motion. We find this simple
method can recover about 50% of the different accretion events, when the
observational uncertainties expected for GAIA are taken into account, even when
the exact form of the Galactic potential is unknown. The recovery rate for DIVA
and FAME is much smaller, but these missions, like GAIA, should be able to test
the hierarchical formation paradigm on our Galaxy by measuring the amount of
halo substructure in the form of nearby kinematically cold streams with for
example, a two-point correlation function in velocity space.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to MNRAS. High resolution color
figures available from http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~ahelmi/astrom.htm