IRIS

Astro-F (IRIS; Infrared Imaging Surveyor)

The Infrared Imaging Surveyor (IRIS) is the second infrared astronomy mission of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS). IRIS is dedicated to infrared sky survey with much better sensitivity than that of IRAS, and is expected to add significant information on many important astrophysical problems (e.g., evolution of galaxies, formation of stars and planets, and brown dwarfs and their relation to dark matter).

IRIS has a 70 cm telescope cooled to 6 K with super-fluid liquid helium and Stirling-cycle coolers. Two focal-plane instruments are installed. One is the Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS) which will survey the entire sky in the wavelength range from 50 to 200 micron with angular resolutions of 30 - 50 arcsec. The other focal-plane instrument is the Infrared Camera (IRC). It employs large-format detector arrays and will take deep images of selected sky regions in the near and mid infrared range. The field of view of the IRC is 10 arcmin and the spatial resolution is approximately 2 arcsec.

IRIS was officially given a new start as the ISAS's 21st science mission "ASTRO-F" in April 1997. It is scheduled to be launched in February, 2003 by the ISAS M-V rocket into a sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of 750 km.