Abstract
The Cosmic Assembly Near-IR Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) is
designed to document the first third of galactic evolution, from redshift $z
8$ to 1.5. It will image more than 250,000 distant galaxies using three
separate cameras on board the Hubble Space Telescope, from the mid-UV to
near-IR. It will also find and measure Type Ia SNe beyond $z > 1.5$ and test
their accuracy as standard candles for cosmology. Five premier multi-wavelength
sky regions are selected. Each has multi-wavelength data from Spitzer\ and
other facilities, plus extensive spectroscopy of the brighter galaxies;
additional ancillary data are still arriving. The use of five widely separated
fields mitigates cosmic variance and yields statistically robust and complete
samples of galaxies down to a stellar mass of $10^9 M_ødot$ out to $z 2$,
and down to the knee of the UV luminosity function of galaxies out to $z \sim
8$. The survey covers approximately 800 square arcminutes and is divided into
two parts. The CANDELS/Deep survey ($5\sigma$ point-source limit $H_AB =
27.7$ mag) covers $125$ square arcminutes within GOODS-N and GOODS-S. The
CANDELS/Wide survey includes GOODS and three additional fields (EGS, COSMOS,
and UDS) and covers the full area to a $5\sigma$ point-source limit of $H_AB
27.0$ mag. Data from the survey are non-proprietary and are expected to
be useful for a wide variety of science investigations. In this paper, we
describe the basic motivations for the survey, the science goals that the
CANDELS team is pursuing and the observational requirements derived from them,
the selection of the fields and field geometry, and the detailed observing
design. The reduction of the Hubble data and planned data releases are
described in a separate companion paper (Koekemoer et al. 2011).
Description
[1105.3753] CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey
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