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Session 3 - SIRTF.
Display session, Monday, January 13
Metropolitan Ballroom,
The Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), which will launch early in the next decade, has an Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) as one of its 3 scientific instruments. We present a description of the IRS of interest to potential guest observers. We show how the capabilities of this instrument are well matched to the physical characterization of sources in numerous investigations We present instrument characteristics, sample sensitivity calculations, and some typical observing scenarios. We make our discussion concrete by presenting the SIRTF-Cornell Echelle spectrograph (SCORE), a prototype of the 10-20 \mum moderate-resolution (R\approx 600) module of the IRS, which has been adapted for use on ground-based telescopes between 7.5 and 15.0 \mum. Since SCORE has no moving parts, and collects the full spectrum in a single cross-dispersed image, it is much faster for spectral surveys of point-like sources than a long slit grating spectrograph, at this spectral resolution. SCORE data have allowed us to develop methods for the reduction of spectral images to wavelength and flux-calibrated data, given lower pixel counts (128\times 128) and higher crosstalk between orders than in CCD spectra of this format reducible by standard packages.
