Announcement: Science with 4MOST – Workshop to prepare the ESO Community for the 4MOST Call for Letters of Intent

by Joe Liske on 2018-08-15

4MOST will be a state-of-the-art, high-multiplex, fibre-fed spectroscopic survey facility at ESO's 4-m VISTA telescope, with a field-of-view large enough to survey a large frac­tion of the southern sky in a few years. During the first 5 years of operations 4MOST will execute a comprehensive programme of both Galactic and extragalactic Public Surveys. 30% of the observing time during this period will be available to the community (while the other 70% will be awarded to the 4MOST Consortium in return for delivering and operating the instrument). The process of selecting 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 of this Call, ESO and the 4MOST Consortium are jointly organising a workshop to take place at ESO on 6-8 May 2019. The purpose of this workshop is to prepare the ESO community for this exciting scientific opportunity, to assist potential PIs to successfully respond to the Call, and to foster scientific collaborations between the community and the 4MOST Consortium. Specifically, the goals are to provide the ESO community with up-to-date information regarding (i) the 4MOST facility, its capabilities, survey strategy, data reduction and science pipelines; (ii) the 4MOST Consortium's scientific plans; and (iii) the application and selection process.

Please register on the workshop's website.

A 4MOST issue of The Messenger has been published in preparation of this workshop.

A Science Team meeting will be held at the MPE in Garching on 9-10 May 2019, immediately following the workshop.