Preface: The LAMOST Galactic surveys and early results

Abstract

By the time of this writing, the ongoing LAMOST Galactic surveys have collected approximately 4.5 million stellar spectra with signal-to-noise ratios better than 10 per pixel. This special issue is devoted to early results from the surveys, mostly based on the LAMOST Data Release 1 (DR1; Luo et al., this volume) that contains data secured by May 2013, the end of the first year of regular surveys, although a few studies have made use of data collected in the second year of regular surveys. LAMOST DR1 was released to the Chinese astronomical community and international partners in August 2013 and made public to the whole world in March 2015. Here we briefly review the scope and motivation, data reduction and release, as well as early results of the surveys. As the project advances, one can expect that these surveys will yield an exquisite description of the distribution, kinematics and chemistry of Galactic stellar populations, especially those within a few kpc of the Sun, a robust measurement of the local dark matter density, and, consequently, shed light on how our Galaxy, and other galaxies in general, form and evolve.