FILTER SIMULATIONS FOR THE SPICA MIRACLE INSTRUMENT IN COMBINATION

The Mid-Infra-Red Camera w/o LEns (MIRACLE) instrument is the proposed imaging camera for one of the the focal plane instruments on SPICA covering the wavelength range from 5-38 microns. Sub-micro-Jansky sensitivities are expected at wavelengths shortward of 10 microns, and sensitivities of the order of a few micro-Jy in the 10 – 40 micron range. We present an initial investigation of the possible narrow filter combinations for MIRACLE, and the advantages of using MIRACLE and SAFARI in tandem to obtain photometric redshifts of high redshift sources. We apply our photometric redshift code that utilizes only the infrared spectra of the target sources and that can successfully and accurately constrain the redshift of our samples over the redshift z∼ 1–5. We find that the addition of the SAFARI bands usually improves greatly the photo-z accuracy at redshifts z> 2, extending out to redshifts of z=5.