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Session 80 - Education, Green Flashes and Future Missions.
Oral session, Thursday, June 11
Friars,
The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), which will be installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during the third servicing mission, is equipped with a wide selection of spectral optical elements to support a large variety of astronomical imaging and slitless spectroscopy programs. Altogether ACS incorporates a total of 38 spectral elements. The suite of filters includes a set of 13 broad and narrow bandpass filters that can be used with both the Wide Field Camera (WFC) and the High Resolution Camera (HRC), four near UV filters for use with the HRC, a set of 5 far UV long-pass crystals and a Ly\alpha filter for the Solar Blind Camera (SBC). In addition, there is a set of four narrow-band (2%) and a medium-band (9%) linearly variable (ramp) filters providing contiguous narrow- and medium-band imaging capabilities in the 370--1050 nm spectral range. For supporting the imaging polarimetry there are two sets of optical and UV optimized polarizers, each of those could be used with either the WFC or the HRC. Dispersing elements include a grism (WFC and HRC), and three prisms -- sapphire (HRC), LiF and CaF_2 (SBC). We will present the (laboratory) measured spectral characteristics of the filters and dispersers and the estimated system throughput including all the elements along the optical path and the detectors. We will give an overview of the expected faintness limits and their impact on the scientific programs to be performed with the ACS.
