The Southern Sky Survey

The Southern Sky Survey will create the first digital map of the southern sky, providing a community available database of a billion objects. This database will be used by entire community, with our group targetting four key areas including: studying the creation of our solar system through a census of distant asteroids, exploring how stars and planets form by observing nearby young stars, probing the shape and extent of the Galaxy's dark matter halo, and discovering when the first stars in the Universe formed. This data set will also be used as a staging ground for a Virtual Observatory.