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M.L.N. Ashby (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) is one of three major scientific instruments soon to be launched aboard the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). This presentation describes a software package -- the IRAC Science Data Simulator (ISDS) -- that generates high-fidelity simulated IRAC science data. While no guarantee of accuracy is made, the intention is to replicate known artifacts of the IRAC instrument as faithfully as possible, using actual IRAC data generated during ground testing. The ISDS was developed with a special emphasis on simulating artifacts specific to IRAC, and should therefore be of particular interest to prospective IRAC observers. The ISDS has already been used to constrain planned IRAC data reduction algorithms, and will have further applications for pipeline development. It is also expected to be useful for those planning IRAC Legacy, GTO, IOC, and GO observations, since before SIRTF launches it can generate extensive datasets against which source extraction routines and other software can be tested.
This work was supported by JPL contract number 960541.