2014 December: official approval of the SPIRou Legacy Survey
The SPIRou Legacy Survey has been approved by the CFHT Board of Directors
During its 2014 December meeting in Hawaii, the Board of Directors of CFHT officially approved the concept of the SPIRou Legacy Survey (SLS) – to be carried out with SPIRou once the instrument is installed and commissioned at CFHT. More specifically, the Board concluded that CFHT should «facilitate the early start of a Large Survey Program [with SPIRou], amounting to at least 300 nights over the first three years [of operation]».
The SLS will be dedicated to the two main science goals of SPIRou, i.e., the quest for habitable Earth-like planets around M dwards, and the study of low-mass star & planet formation in the presence of magnetic fields. Thanks to its high Legacy content, the SLS is expected to be quite fruitful for the whole community and for a wide variety of science programs. The SPIRou science team is currently working on a more detailed description of the SLS, to be finalized and approved by CFHT in 2016, and whose full allocation should ultimately reach as much as ~500 CFHT nights.
