Will Percival (University of Portsmouth, UK), Roelof de Jong (AIP, Potsdam) , Chris Benn (ING, La Palma), Joe Mohr (LMU & MPE, Munich)

There is a pressing need for new multi-object spectrographs (MOS) on 4m-class telescopes capable of measuring many thousands of spectra simultaneously over a large field-of-view, thereby enabling spectroscopy of millions of objects over a large fraction of a hemisphere in a few years. Provision of highly-multiplexed spectrographs on 4-m telescopes was a strong recommendation of ASTRONET's 'European Telescope Strategy Review Committee' (Drew report, 2008). For Gaia, follow-up with a ground-based MOS on a 4-m class telescope is crucial for fully exploiting the substantial investment in the mission. Support for Euclid could be provided by undertaking a large "low-redshift" galaxy survey to help understand dark energy and galaxy evolution. Many other science projects would benefit from such a resource. This session will review the science that such instruments are capable of delivering, discuss proposed instruments on 4-m telescopes such as 4MOST (NTT/VISTA), WEAVE (WHT), BigBOSS (Mayall), DESpec (Blanco), and Hermes (AAT), and consider their complementarity with other proposed spectroscopic surveys such as MOONS, Hectospec, GTC/CO-IRS, PFS and Euclid.

Poster Session B runs from Thursday 29th to Friday 30th March 2012