The Two Micron All Sky Survey at IPAC
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The Two Micron All Sky Survey at IPAC
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A topical session brought together researchers for the first time to
present and discuss scientific results enabled by 2MASS
over a broad range of disciplines was held during the
198th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, CA.
All researchers who have used 2MASS in their investigations or who are
interested in learning more about 2MASS and its many applications attended and
participated.
The 2MASS objective has been to carry out a highly uniform, digital imaging survey of the entire sky in three near infrared bands. The observational phase of 2MASS is now complete - the final portions of the sky were scanned from the survey's facilities on Mt. Hopkins and Cerro Tololo in October 2000. Processing of the nearly 24 TB of raw digital data collected by the survey will continue through 2001 and early 2002, and the final extracted data products will be released at the end of 2002. |
| In March 2000, 2MASS released to the public the single largest collection of astronomical data from a NASA mission. The 2MASS Second Incremental Data Release (IDR2) covers nearly half of the sky and consists of nearly two million calibrated FITS Atlas Images, a catalog containing photometry and astrometry of over 162 million near infrared point sources, and a catalog of photometry and positions for nearly 600,000 resolved near infrared sources, mostly galaxies. Astronomers can access these products via the on-line services of the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/Caltech and Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strausbourg (CDS), and through bulk electronic and DVD distributions. |
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With nearly half of the near-infrared sky in the public domain, the number of publications that utilize 2MASS data products either exclusively or together with data sets at other wavelengths is growing rapidly (see the 2MASS Science Publications page). Investigations have spanned a broad range of topics including asteroids, low mass stars and brown dwarfs, stellar populations in the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud, galaxies in the local Universe, distant active galactic nuclei and the cosmic near-infrared background. The topical session highlighted these diverse studies, and also illustrated the wide variety of applications that can be served by this new, massive data set for those not yet familiar with 2MASS. |
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The topical session was a full-day program of oral presentations
and an accompanying dedicated poster session on 2001 June 5.
The morning and afternoon
sessions opened with brief technical presentations describing the
2MASS mission and how users can access the data products. The day was
divided into three sequential sessions organized by broad scientific
discipline:
The bulk of the time in each session was allocated for 15 minute contributed science presentations describing research with 2MASS. Posters were organized according to the same disciplines.
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