News: This exciting joint Special Session of the 4MOST and WEAVE projects is currently scheduled for the afternoon of Friday 3 July. Details of the programme including a list of invited speakers is currently being discussed.

This joint Special Session by the WEAVE and 4MOST Projects will take place at a timely moment as both projects reach decisive milestones in their operations, offering a unique opportunity to present to the scientific community the performances of both facilities and their first scientific results. By the time of the meeting, WEAVE's Multi-Object Spectrograph (MOS) mode will have completed its Science Verification campaign and the first two years of survey and Open-Time observations with its its Large Integral-Field Unit (LIFU) mode, while 4MOST will have concluded its Survey Programme Validation (SPV) phase and will be preparing for its first public Data Release (DR0).

The two surveys are not only complementary in their sky coverage, but also offer strong synergies across their scientific goals, ranging from stellar and interstellar physics and Milky Way investigations to the study of galaxy formation and cosmology. This joint Special Session will provide the community with the most up-to-date overview of the two facilities, their science, and data model. It will highlight both published and anticipated results across a wide range of astrophysical domains, drawing from consortia-led surveys and from community-driven projects. Invited and contributed presentations will showcase WEAVE science from its surveys and Open-Time observations, provide guidance for preparing future Open-Time proposals, and present the first results from 4MOST along with the plans for the 25 4MOST survey programmes to be carried out over the next five years.

This Special Session aims to bring together members of the astronomical community interested in the WEAVE and 4MOST facilities, regardless of whether you are already engaged in these projects, and will offer a unique opportunity to engage with the teams behind the facilities via a dedicated question-and-answer session with PIs and Project Scientist teams. It will also provide first hands-information on data releases and data access for both WEAVE and 4MOST.

Large consortia with several hundred members and a global reach have become commonplace in astronomy, with WEAVE and 4MOST being no exceptions to this landscape. Such large projects, whether ground- or space-based, go through several transition phases, and WEAVE and 4MOST are both currently entering a new phase in their operations. This EAS session is therefore also ideally placed to discuss how critical transition phases and the changing needs of astronomical projects are understood and addressed by the stakeholders, such as the funding bodies as well as the projects themselves. This is vital to enable a fully funded and fully built facility to successfully operate and generate quality scientific output for many years after their completion. The outcomes of large consortia are built upon the critical work of a generation of scientifically trained individuals, including astronomers, engineers, programmers and managers. The fact that key contributors can fall through the cracks of the funding systems of different countries is not a new phenomenon, but there is now a more heightened awareness and appreciation for how the loss of their highly valuable expertise affects large astronomical projects. We will therefore allocate time within our session to address this timely and critical topic, laying the groundwork for further discussions. We therefore warmly invite contributions towards this topic from those with experiences beyond the WEAVE and 4MOST consortia.

Programme

Do you have an exciting scientific result from WEAVE data? Would you like to present your analysis of WEAVE data that could be complemented through anticipated 4MOST data? Are you working on science that will benefit from data from both facilities? Could you provide insights into the effect of current funding schemes on the long-term operation of large astronomical consortia? We welcome contributions for this session in the form of talks and poster presentations, and look forward to receiving your abstracts!

We expect the programme to consist of topics including (but not restricted to) the following:

• Overviews of the WEAVE and 4MOST facilities, including current status, results from commissioning and science verification, forward look and lessons learned
• WEAVE science results from Open Time and surveys
• Scope and preparation of the 4MOST Survey Programme Validation
• Cross-survey calibration coordinated across different surveys, including 4MOST, WEAVE, SDSSV and DESI
• Data processing, contributed pipelines, software and data products, archiving, and data releases for WEAVE and 4MOST
• Transitioning from building an instrument to running survey operations by large astronomical projects, and how it is affected by current funding schemes

Invited speakers

List of invited speakers to be confirmed.

Scientific organisers

• J. Alfonso L. Aguerri (IAC, Spain) – WEAVE
• Angela Bragaglia (INAF-OAS Bologna, Italy) – WEAVE, 4MOST
• Ása Skuladottir (Università de Firenze, Italy) – 4MOST
• Dan Smith (University of Hertfordshire, U.K.) – WEAVE, 4MOST
• Guillaume Thomas (IAC, Spain) – WEAVE
• Jakob Walcher (AIP, Germany) – 4MOST
• Janet Drew (UCL, U.K.) – WEAVE
• Jonathan Loveday (University of Sussex, U.K) – 4MOST
• Kelley Hess (Onsala Space Observatory/Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) – WEAVE
• Marica Valentini (AIP, Germany) – 4MOST, WEAVE
• Marcella Longhetti (INAF-OA Brera, Italy) – WEAVE, 4MOST
• Michael Hayden (University of Oklahoma, USA) – 4MOST
• Nada Ihanec (ING, Spain) – WEAVE
• Rosanna Sordo (INAF-OA Padova, Italy) – 4MOST; co-Chair
• Shoko Jin (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, The Netherlands) – WEAVE; Chair

Contact

Session co-chairs:

• Shoko Jin (jin[at]astro.rug.nl)
• Rosanna Sordo (rosanna.sordo[at]inaf.it)