SPICA

SPICA was a joint European and Japanese mission and it was one of three candidates for the M5 mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision science program.

In the last design, it had a 1.8-m primary mirror actively cooled to below 8K with three instruments covering mid- to far-IR wavelengths with spectrometers and photometric cameras, equipped with state-of-the-art detectors. These three instruments were:

• the SPICA Far Infrared Instrument (SAFARI), which consisted on a spectrograph with low (R∼250) and medium (R∼3000-11000) resolution observing modes, covering the wavelength range 35-210 μm;

• the SPICA Mid-Infrared Instrument (SMI) with three observing modes: i) low-resolution (R∼50-120) spectroscopy at 17-36 μm and photometry at 36 μm over a large field-of-view (12'x10'), ii) medium-resolution (R∼2000) spectroscopy at 18-36 μm, and iii) high-resolution (R∼29000) spectroscopy at 10-18 μm;

• the B-fields with BOlometers and Polarisers (B-BOP), which was a large field-of-view (2'.6x2') polarimetric camera equipped with three different channels (70μm , 200μm and 350μm)

Using the state-of-the-art Spritz simulation, we investigated the population of galaxies and active galactic nuclei that was expected to be observed in SPICA spectro-photometric surveys.