Mid-infrared all-sky survey with AKARI/IRC

AKARI is the first Japanese astronomical infrared satellite mission orbiting around the Earth in a sun-synchronous polar orbit at the altitude of 700 km. One of the major observation programs of the AKARI is an all-sky survey in the mid- to far-infrared spectral regions with 6 photometric bands. The mid-infrared part of the AKARI All-Sky Survey was carried out with the Infrared Camera (IRC) at the 9 and 18 µm bands with the sensitivity of about 50 and 120 mJy (5σ per scan), respectively. The spatial resolution is about 9.4" at both bands. AKARI mid-infrared (MIR) all-sky survey substantially improves the MIR dataset of the IRAS survey of two decades ago and provides a significant database for studies of various fields of astronomy ranging from star-formation and debris disk systems to cosmology. This paper describes the current status of the data reduction and the characteristics of the AKARI MIR all-sky survey data.

[1]  Martin G. Cohen,et al.  Absolute Calibration of the Infrared Array Camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope , 2005, astro-ph/0507139.

[2]  S. Oh,et al.  The infrared astronomical mission AKARI , 2007, 0708.1796.

[3]  Munetaka Ueno,et al.  Mid‐Infrared All‐Sky Survey with the Infrared Camera (IRC) on Board the ASTRO‐F Satellite , 2006 .

[4]  Hidehiro Kaneda,et al.  In-orbit focal adjustment of the AKARI telescope with Infrared Camera (IRC) images (Special issue: AKARI initial results) , 2007 .

[5]  Mark R. Kidger,et al.  Spectral Irradiance Calibration in the Infrared. X. A Self-Consistent Radiometric All-Sky Network of Absolutely Calibrated Stellar Spectra , 1999 .

[6]  de T. Jong,et al.  The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) mission , 1984 .

[7]  Munetaka Ueno,et al.  AKARI Infrared Imaging of Reflection Nebulae IC4954 and IC4955 , 2007, 0708.1854.

[8]  Martin G. Cohen,et al.  The Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS) for AKARI , 2007, 0708.3004.

[9]  M. Egan,et al.  Midcourse Space Experiment Survey of the Galactic Plane , 2001 .

[10]  Takashi Onaka,et al.  Ground-based Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy of Faint Standard Stars in the North Ecliptic Polar Region for the ASTRO-F Infrared Camera , 2006 .

[11]  Martin Cohen,et al.  The Infrared Camera (IRC) for AKARI: in-flight imaging performance and the post cryogen mission , 2008, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[12]  Hiroshi Murakami,et al.  The infrared astronomical satellite AKARI: overview, highlights of the mission , 2008, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[13]  N. Takeyama,et al.  The Infrared Camera (IRC) for AKARI–Design and Imaging Performance , 2007, 0705.4144.