Vista Hemisphere Survey Newsletter: Issue 2 (May 2007) ------------------------------------------------------------- Dear VHS Colleagues, I want to update you on progress with VHS and ask for your input in terms of the human resources available as input into the revised Survey Management Plan(SMP) which is due with ESO next week. I have already sent ESO a response to their specific questions that they asked. The acceptance by ESO of the SMP is the final stage of the VHS review. I include at the end of this email the OPC feedback that was provided from ESO. VHS was ranked the highest of the six Public Survey proposals. The initial SMP was submitted to ESO in February and is on the VHS website at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~rgm/vhs/smp/ ESO responded with so called Review Items or RIXes and I have sent the response to these to ESO. The original SMP and the response to the RIXes is available on the webpage above. I am now updating the SMP document and this needs to include information about the human resources that we have for both scientific exploitation and survey management. ESO has specifically asked for details of the FTE that the collaboration will devote to the survey management, execution and scientific analysis. My goal is have a minimum of 15FTEs of effort from the collaboration. Already I have about half of this as a verbal commitment from some of you. Could each institute involved or individual which ever is the more convenient provide me with some information about the likely level of human resources they will commit to survey management, data quality assurance and sciencetific exploitation. Below I provide a template that you can use. This is not intended as a carve-up of the VHS science but is intended to provide an estimate for ESO of the total amount of FTE that the collaboration has available. I will summarise the information and provide the totals by Institute to ESO. When we have a clearer idea of when VISTA will start operations I will arrange a collaboration meeting. Also, once the SMP is accepted we can then start to define how we shall work as a collaboration. So far, I have created a Collaboration Management Board which consists of the following individuals: Richard McMahon Francisco Castander Jim Emerson Andrew Lawrence Rafael Rebolo Hans Walter Rix I think that this gives a fair representation of the main groups involved, scientifically and regionally. It can evolve over time. Best regards Richard Please fill in the template below and return it to me by the end of next Tuesday 29th May. If you need more time please let me know. The template is not intended as a legal contract but as a honest estimate of the effort that you expect to be able to provide to the VHS project. Some of you are members of other VISTA survey consortiums and in some cases it may be appropiate to assign the some of the same effort to more than one survey. For instance OB preparation will probably require some software to be designed and written which can be used for for more than one survey. In my opinion working with data from more than one survey will help with some of the quality control since debugging software or classifying a new type of artifacts only has to happen once. ------------------- VHS Human Resources Template ------------------- Name(s): This can be a single name for an institue that has multiple co-investigators. Institute: Commmited FTE: can include self, post-docs, graduate student effort Survey components: one or more of VHS-DES, VHS-ATLAS, VHS-GPS Survey Tasks and sub-tasks: [select a few from the list below and/or add some new ones] Observing block preparation Survey Progress Independent source catalogue generation Source catalogue validation Astrometry Star-galaxy separation Photometric calibration Stellar photometry Stellar confusion Stellar incompleteness Galaxy photometry Galaxy incompletness Multi-waveband merging Artifact characterisation and quantification .... Additional tasks that you are interested in doing Scientific Focus: [select or add a few] Large scale structure of the Universe Low mass stars Quasars and active galaxies Planck GAIA XMM-Newton Far-infra red survey science; e.g. WISE, AKARI X-ray surveys Radio surveys Photometric redshifts Milky Way structure Galaxy clusters Additional science themes Below is scientific feedback I have received from ESO. Report by the VISTA PSP on the VISTA Hemisphere Survey ------------------------------------------------------ This proposal was well received by the PSP panel. Survey of the whole southern hemisphere, deeper than 2MASS will provide a wealth of important scientific results, several of which are well described in the proposal. The authors have improved their original proposal by combining with DES and clarifying the areas that would be covered in the various bands: (a) VHS-DES 120s in JHK, over 4000+ sq. deg., ZY from DES. (b) VHS-ATLAS 60s in YJHK, over 5000+ sq. deg., Z from VST-ATLAS. (c) VHS-GPS 60s in JK, over 8000+ sq. deg., 5