We present radial velocity and new interferometric measurements of the double star Atlas , which permit , with the addition of published interferometric data , to precisely derive the orbital parameters of the binary system and the masses of the components .
The derived semi-major axis , compared with its measured angular size , allows to determine a distance to Atlas of 132 \pm 4 pc in a purely geometrical way .
Under the assumption that the location of Atlas is representative of the average distance of the cluster , we confirm the distance value generally obtained through main sequence fitting , in contradiction with the early Hipparcos result ( 118.3 \pm 3.5 pc ) .