SDSS 2020: Delivering Innovative Science to the Community

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The Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V) will be the world's first all-sky, multi-epoch, optical and IR spectroscopic survey. SDSS-V will create an unprecedented dataset designed to decode the history of the Milky Way, trace the emergence of the chemical elements, understand the inner workings and deaths of stars, investigate the origin of planets, and map the growth of black holes. It will create a new map of the interstellar gas in the Galaxy and the Local Group, 1,000 times larger than the current state of the art, which is needed in order to quantify the physics that regulate the formation of galaxies and understand the origins of our Milky Way. These natural experiments allow researchers to probe physical conditions that cannot currently be created in Earth bound laboratories. The data and analysis tools from SDSS will be fully released to the public providing an accessible platform for all scientists at all institutions as well as critical STEM education from K-12. In addition to the science, SDSS-V cultivates the world’s next generation of instrumentalists capable of delivering vanguard precision and robotic instrumentation across the optical and infrared spectrum to the world. The support of these future scientific and technical innovators enhances the national STEM workforce.The SDSS-V program is a union of three key Mapper projects: The Milky Way Mapper is the only planned infrared, dual-hemisphere survey capable of penetrating interstellar dust to uncover the Galactic archaeological record in all regions of the Milky Way. The Local Volume Mapper’s enormous integral-field spectral map of the interstellar gas and star formation in the nearest galaxies will directly probe the scales at which feedback regulates galaxy growth. The Black Hole Mapper will reveal the nature of cosmic X-ray sources discovered by eROSITA early in its mission and will be the first time-domain spectroscopic survey to probe accretion physics across the full range of black holes in the Universe, from stellar-mass to supermassive. SDSS-V will undertake a robust program of education, outreach, and workforce development activities that leverage the project's commitment to curating data products and collaborative structures that are open, transparent, and inclusive. SDSS-V intentionally provides a training ground for the future astronomical infrastructure developers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.