The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS). Science Case and Survey Design

By M. Lacy, S. Baum, C. Chandler, S. Chatterjee, T. Clarke, S. Deustua, J. English, Jamie S. Farnes, B. Gaensler, N. Gugliucci and 68 more. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2019

434 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) is a synoptic, all-sky radio sky survey with a unique combination of high angular resolution (≈2.″5), sensitivity (a 1σ goal of 70 μJy/beam in the coadded data), full linear Stokes polarimetry, time domain coverage, and wide bandwidth (2–4 GHz). The first observations began in 2017 September, and observing for the survey will finish in 2024. VLASS will use approximately 5500 hr of time on the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to cover the whole sky visible to the VLA (decl. > −40°), a total of 33 885 deg 2 . The data will be taken in three epochs to allow the discovery of variable and transient radio sources. The survey is designed to engage radio astronomy experts, multi-wavelength astronomers, and citizen scientists alike. By utilizing an “on the fly” interferometry mode, the observing overheads are much reduced compared to a conventional pointed survey. In this paper, we present the science case and observational strategy for the survey, and also results from early survey observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7542d2ff48754abe5571ac621f3ee58a14d0a54c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications for Radio Astronomy (2022, methodology): “Different versions of these pipelines are maintained by NRAO for processing data from the VLA and VLA Sky Survey (Kent et al. 2020), as well as the Science Ready Data Products program (Lacy et al. 2020).”
• Characterizing the Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Population and its Connection to Transients in the Local and Extragalactic Universe (2021, methodology): “We tested our astrometric precision by associating radio sources in the FRB-epoch VLA image with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS; Lacy et al. 2020) Epoch 1 Quick Look catalog (Gordon et al. 2020).”