The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) will be installed in the Hubble Space Telescope during the third servicing mission in December 1999. 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"204"), 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"29" 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"29" field of view. ACS will increase HST's capability for surveys and discovery by at least a factor of 10.
At the time of this conference the ACS will be nearing final assembly. We give an overview of the design and discuss image the quality of the optics, performance of the two WFC 2kx4k CCDs, the HRC 1K CCD, and the 1kx1k solar-blind detector. Based on the measurements of the ACS components, we estimate the overall performance of the ACS, and compare this to previous HST cameras. Subsequent papers in this conference provide detailed discussions of ACS subsystems, flight software, and on-orbit operations.
Keywords: SM3, HST Advanced Camera, CCDs, filters
Brief Biography, Principal Author:
Presently: Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, and Astronomer, Space Telescope Science Institute; P.I., HST Advanced Camera for Surveys. Formerly: co-investigator, HST FOS; project scientist, COSTAR. Research interests: planetary nebulae and novae, jets and AGN, the extragalactic distance scale, and spacecraft instrumentation. Ph.D., Astronomy, University of Wisconsin, 1970.
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