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M.M. Freund (NASA/GSFC), S.H. Moseley (NASA/GSFC), T. Nakagawa (ISAS), T. Matsumoto (ISAS), H. Shibai (Nagoya Univ.), ASPIRE Collaboration
The ASPIRE mission will provide the international astronomical community with data from an unbiased all-sky survey by the Far Infrared Surveyer (FIS) onboard the Japanese Astro-F (IRIS) satellite. An all-sky survey is very efficient in producing scientific results. It allows to detect intrinsically rare objects that would be missed by limited sky surveys. ASPIRE will provide target lists in time for efficient follow-up pointed observations with narrow field-of-view telescopes like SIRTF, SOFIA and FIRST at a low cost to the US community.
The Astro-F satellite contains a 70 cm telescope cooled to 6 K with super-fluid liquid helium and Stirling-cycle coolers. The FIS instrument uses state-of-the-art 2D stressed and unstressed Ge:Ge detector arrays and cold readout electronics. Astro-F is scheduled to be launched in August 2003 by an ISAS M-V rocket into a sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of 750 km. The FIS operates between 50-200\micron at a diffraction limited spatial resolution of 30-50 \arcsec in four bands at sensitivities of approximately 18, 25, 110, and 90 mJy between 50-70, 50-110, 150-200, and 110-200 \micron. These sensitivities are up to 20\times higher than IRAS. The final data products will consist of point source catalogs, images and small scale maps. We expect to detect in excess of 10 million far-IR sources, from solar system objects to ultra-luminous galaxies at cosmological distances. The science objectives include important astrophysical topics, like large scale structure, evolution of galaxies, systematic investigation of the star formation process, and the evolution of planets and brown dwarfs.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: mino@lasp.gsfc.nasa.gov