Key science goals

Our primary goal is to produce IR sky atlases as a fundamental resource of lasting significance analogous to the UK Schmidt photographic sky surveys. None of the survey components we propose covers the whole sky, but nonetheless we feel that each component deserves the term ''atlas'', as the volume surveyed, and the number of objects detected, are comparable to the Schmidt surveys, and each survey maps out some significant part of the universe - the solar neighbourhood, the Milky Way, the local extragalactic universe, the universe at z=1, and the universe at z=3. In addition, the datasets will act as data mines, becoming the source for much future work we can only guess at.

However, as the consortium debated scientific topics that an IR survey programme could make an impact on, we designed the parameters of the programme to meet specific scientific goals. The most important of these specific goals are as follows :