The Ultimate Infrared Sky Survey

Mercury, March/April 2003 Table of Contents

This 2MASS near-infrared image reveals a central bar in galaxy NGC 253 that does not appear in optical images. Courtesy of UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF.

by Schuyler Van Dyk

The 2MASS survey brings the infrared sky to your fingertips.

Jack Dembicky, the Northern Hemisphere observer for tonight, enters the dome at dusk and readies for another night of routine observations by the Two Micron All Sky Survey, or 2MASS, for short. He fills the camera dewar on the telescope and loads the schedule file for tonight's observations into the computer program, which automatically controls the operations of both the telescope and the camera. It looks like it's going to be a good night on Mount Hopkins, about 55 kilometers south of Tucson, Arizona. With a push of a button on the keyboard, the telescope flies into motion. Jack leans back in his chair, monitoring the observations as they come off the telescope and settles himself in for the long night.

This night, one of hundreds, would turn out to be normal for 2MASS operations, which began in April 1997 and finished in February 2001. 2MASS is an ambitious joint project carried out by the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (UMass) and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology, and is funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation. The project has involved about 35 scientists and 30 software engineers and operators from UMass, IPAC, and other institutions, led by principal investigator Michael F. Skrutskie (now at the University of Virginia), lead scientist Roc M. Cutri (IPAC), and project manager Rae F. Stiening (UMass).

2MASS's goal was to conduct a highly uniform digital imaging survey of the entire sky in three near-infrared bands: J (1.25 microns, or 0.00125 millimeters), H (1.65 microns), and K-"short" (2.17 microns). The results include an image Atlas, as well as highly reliable and complete catalogs of point sources (mostly stars) and extended sources (mostly galaxies). "2MASS" is a play on words "2 microns" (near the wavelength of the reddest band) and "UMass."

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