The Advanced Camera for the Hubble Space Telescope

Session 121 - Instrumentation: Status and Plans.
Oral session, Thursday, January 18
La Condesa, Hilton

[121.05] The Advanced Camera for the Hubble Space Telescope

R. Brown (STScI), H. Ford, P. Feldman, Z. Tsvetanov (JHU), F. Bartko (U.Co.), P. Bely, C. Burrows, M. Clampin, J. Crocker, G. Hartig, M. Postman, W. Sparks, R. White (STScI), E. Cheng, R. Kimble, S. Neff (GSFC), G. Illingworth (UCSC), M. Lesser (U.Az.), G. Miley (U.Leiden), R. Woodruff (Ball Aerospace)

The JHU and Ball Aerospace Advanced Camera for the HST will have a high throughput, wide field (200'' \times 200''), optical and I-band camera which is critically sampled at 1000 nm, a high resolution optical and near-UV camera critically sampled at 500 nm, and a high throughput, far-UV camera.

The AC's survey capability will be optimized for optical and NIR studies of the early Universe. The optimization is achieved by combining a novel, three-mirror optical design for the wide field camera with high reflectivity optical and NIR mirror and window coatings, a large format CCD optimized for the NIR, and a camera orientation chosen to minimize the time required to move to an adjacent field and begin a new exposure. The AC will increase HST's capability for surveys and discovery in the NIR by a factor of \sim 10.

In this paper we report our progress on design, filters, and detectors.

This work is supported by NASA contract NAS 5-32865.

Program listing for Thursday