ASTRO-F Survey as Input Catalogues for FIRST

Abstract

ASTRO-F is the second Japanese space mission for infrared astronomy and is scheduled to be launched into a sun-synchronous polar orbit by the Japanese M-V rocket in February 2004. ASTRO-F has a cooled 67 cm telescope with two focal plane instruments: one is the Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS) and the other is the Infrared Camera (IRC). The main purpose of FIS is to perform the all-sky survey with four photometric bands in the wavelength range of 50 - 200 $μ$m. The advantages of the FIS survey over the IRAS survey are (1) higher spatial resolution ($30''$ at 50-110 $μ$m and $50''$ at 110-200 $μ$m) and (2) better sensitivity by one to two orders of magnitude. The FIS survey will provide the next generation far-infrared survey catalogs, which will be ideal inputs for observations by FIRST. The other instrument, IRC, will make deep imaging and low-resolution spectroscopic observations in the spectral range of $1.8-26 μ$m. The IRC will make large-area surveys with its wide field of view ($10' \times 10'$), and will be complementary with the FIRST observations at longer wavelengths.

8 pages, 10 Postscript figures, uses toledoStyle.cls, To appear in `The Promise of FIRST' conference proceedings (ESA SP-460) edited by G.L. Pilbratt, J. Cernicharo, A.M. Heras, T. Prusti, and R. Harris, for high-quality figures, see http://www.ir.isas.ac.jp/ASTRO-F/Documents/FPI/nakagawa/toledo_astro-f.ps