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R. N. Hook, A. Pasquali, N. Pirzkal, J. R. Walsh (ST-ECF/ESO), R. A. E. Fosbury (ST-ECF/ESA), W. Freudling (ST-ECF/ESO), R. Albrecht (ST-ECF/ESA)
The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) is to be installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during the 2001 servicing mission. This instrument features a large format array, the Wide Field Camera (WFC), which offers a FOV of 3.4' x 3.4' with a scale of 0.05''/pixel. The WFC is equipped with a grism covering the spectral range 550 - 1100nm at R~100.
We present direct and grism ACS simulations of the HDF-N generated using the ST-ECF grism simulator SLIM and based on the current estimates of the instrument performance. Template QSO and starburst spectra have been used to create simulations with redshifts of 0.7, 1.6 and 6.5 and over a magnitude range V=18-25. These indicate that:
i) For a starburst at z=0.7 exposed for one hour, the emission line of [OII] 373nm is detected down to V=23 with S/N~8 and the [OIII] doublet at 501nm can be detected down to V=24 with S/N~20.
ii) For a starburst at z=1.6 in a one hour exposure, the [OII] 373nm feature is visible down to V=22 with S/N~10.
iii) A QSO with V=25 at z=6.5 produces a flux in the Ly-alpha line of ~3x10-17 ergs cm-2 s-1 which can be detected with a S/N of ~5 in a 1 hour exposure.
These estimates indicate that the ACS grism mode will be a powerful tool for studying faint emission line objects.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: rhook@eso.org