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Session 80 - Education, Green Flashes and Future Missions.
Oral session, Thursday, June 11
Friars,
The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) will be installed in the Hubble Space Telescope during the third HST servicing mission. The ACS has three cameras. The first, the Wide Field Camera, will be a high throughput (45% at 700 nm, including the HST OTA), wide field (200"x204"), optical and I-band camera that is half critically sampled at 500 nm. The second, the High Resolution Camera (HRC), is critically sampled at 500 nm, and has a 26"x29" field of view and 25% throughput at 600 nm. The HRC optical path will include a coronagraph which will improve the HST contrast near bright objects by a factor of 10. The third camera is a far ultraviolet, Solar-Blind Camera (SBC), that has a relatively high throughput (6% at 121.6 nm) over a 26"x29" field of view. ACS will increase HST's capability for surveys and discovery by at least a factor of 10. The construction of the ACS is currently nearing completion, with ground calibration scheduled during the fall. In this paper we present an overview of the ACS instrument design, its science goals and discuss the projected performance of the WFC, HRC, and the SBC, based on initial laboratory measurements of the detectors and optics.
