Dome C Astronomy and Astrophysics Meeting M. Giard, F. Casoli and F. Paletou (eds) EAS Publications Series, 14 (2005) 187–192 WIDE FIELD, INTEGRAL FIELD SPECTROSCOPY AT DOME C WITH AN INFRARED IMAGING FTS J.P. Maillard 1 and C. Joblin 2 Abstract. In the study of extended sources such as star forming re- gions, galactic planetary nebulae or comets wide field integral-field spectroscopy at high spectral resolution in the infrared, would be the ideal tool. It is shown that an imaging FTS (IFTS) is the only in- strument which can combine a wide field, up to ∼10 ′ , with a spectral resolution ≥10 5 . At Dome C, in the 2 to 25 μm region, as instrument of a 3-m class telescope, a wide-field IFTS would have no equivalent in space and on ground. It can take full advantage of all the astronomi- cal properties of this site, in particular the lowest thermal background emission conditions on Earth. A program to simulate the expected performances has been developed. At the highest resolution the best sensitivity implies the use of narrow-band filters on the emission lines of interest. 1 Introduction For the study of extended objects, or objects in crowded fields, the ideal instru- ment is an Integral Field Spectrometer (IFS). This new type of spectrometer provides a spectrum of all points a field, then making possible to generate im- ages specific of each chemical species present in the sources from their emission spectrum. There are two separate domains of application, which imply differ- ent instrumental solutions: i) the studies which require a high spatial resolution, as for example the disks and jets of young stars – few arcsecs fields are enough; ii) the studies of wide objects (several arcmins) such as the molecular clouds. Quite often the active parts are deeply embedded, attenuated by high dust extinction. Therefore, the spectral domain of analysis is the infrared or the sub-mm. We fo- cus here on the wide-field case in the infrared range which makes possible to reach 1 Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS et Universit´ e P. & M. Curie, 98 bis Bd. Arago, 75014 Paris, France; e-mail: maillard@iap.fr 2 Centre d’ ´ Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, CNRS et Universit´ e Paul Sabatier, 9 Av. du Colonel Roche, 31028 Toulouse Cedex 4, France c  EAS, EDP Sciences 2005 DOI: 10.1051/eas:2005029 Article published by EDP Sciences and available at http://www.edpsciences.org/eas or http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/eas:2005029