Future Spectroscopic Surveys

Earlier last week there was a meeting here at ESO, Garching regarding spectroscopic surveys. It outlined some of the currently on going and planned programs that will provide *alot* of spectra!! Since stellar spectra are what I work with, I am interested in what kind of opportunities will be there in the future. In particular those surveys are focusing on the stellar populations within our own Galaxy.

One such mission which is scheduled to be launched by 2012 is Gaia: it is expected to collect spectra of about 1 billion stars within our Milky Way! This should give us plenty of data to work on, especially for us to apply the technique of chemical tagging to learn about how the Galactic disk was built up.

One of the speakers at this meeting last week was one of my former PhD supervisors from Sydney University. Its always nice to meet up with those I worked with back in Australia. As always he is very busy with plenty of people waiting to talk with him, but we managed to have a chat about some new projects to start in the upcoming semester and apply for telescope time. The deadline for the applications to use ESO telescopes is due April 1st!! Last year I was too busy to apply for telescope time with all the traveling and babies, but now I should manage to submit several proposals. The next two weeks will be busy….!