Preparing for 4MOST. A community workshop introducing ESO’s next-generation spectroscopic survey facility.
ESO-HQ, Garching b. München, Germany
May 6-8, 2019
4MOST is a state-of-the-art, high-multiplex, fibre-fed, optical spectroscopic survey facility currently under construction for ESO’s 4-m VISTA telescope. Its field-of-view will be large enough to survey a large fraction of the southern sky in a few years, and its multiplex of 2400 fibres enables surveys of millions of objects. During the first five years of operations 4MOST will be used to execute a comprehensive, integrated programme of both Galactic and extragalactic Public Surveys. 30% of the observing time during this period will be available to the whole ESO community, while the other 70% will be awarded to the 4MOST Consortium in return for delivering and operating the instrument. The 4MOST survey programme will thus consist of both Consortium Surveys and Community Surveys, ideally with a high degree of complementarity, both scientifically and in terms of observing efficiency. The process of selecting the Community Surveys will be initiated by a "Call for Letters of Intent for Public Spectroscopic Surveys", to be issued by ESO in mid-2019.
In preparation for this Call, ESO and the 4MOST Consortium are jointly organising a workshop to take place at ESO Garching on 6-8 May 2019. The purpose of this workshop is to transfer knowledge from the 4MOST Consortium to the broader ESO community and hence to prepare the community for this exciting scientific opportunity. This will assist potential community PIs in successfully responding to the Call, and foster scientific collaborations between the community and the 4MOST Consortium.
Specifically, the goals of the workshop are to:
- provide the ESO community with up-to-date information regarding
- the 4MOST facility, its capabilities, survey strategy, data reduction and science pipelines
- the 4MOST Consortium’s scientific plans, embodied in ten interleaved Galactic and extragalactic Consortium Surveys
- the application and selection processes for 4MOST Community Surveys
- provide the ESO community with an opportunity to present their scientific ideas for 4MOST Community Surveys
- provide a platform for discussion, networking and collaboration between potential Community Survey PIs and the 4MOST Consortium, and to explore complementarities between Consortium Surveys and potential Community Surveys
All members of the ESO community are invited to learn about 4MOST and to present their scientific ideas for 4MOST Community Surveys.
Note that a series of 4MOST articles has been published in the March 2019 issue of the ESO Messenger in preparation of this workshop.
Three overview articles describe the 4MOST project and instrument, the 4MOST science operations, and its current survey plan. An additional ten articles, one for each of the Consortium Surveys, describe the scientific plans of the 4MOST Consortium. It is important to note that, while the science cases of these surveys are fixed, their exact scope is necessarily still subject to change, as this depends to some extent on the Community Surveys that are eventually selected and the on-sky performance of the instrument.
For information please contact 4most-loc@eso.org.