The Hyper Suprime-Cam SSP Survey: Overview and survey design

TLDR

Hyper Suprime‑Cam (HSC) is a wide‑field imaging camera mounted on the 8.2 m Subaru telescope at Maunakea, Hawaii. The paper introduces the HSC instrument, outlines the survey’s science goals, strategy, and data processing, and serves as an introduction to a special issue featuring early results. The survey will span 300 nights, imaging the high‑latitude sky in five broad bands with three tiers—Wide (1400 deg², r≈26), Deep (26 deg², ~1 mag deeper), and UltraDeep (3.5 deg², ~2 mag deeper). The paper introduces a special issue that compiles technical and scientific papers reporting early results from the survey.

Abstract

Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is a wide-field imaging camera on the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. A team of scientists from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University is using HSC to carry out a 300-night multi-band imaging survey of the high-latitude sky. The survey includes three layers: the Wide layer will cover 1400 deg$^2$ in five broad bands ($grizy$), with a $5\,\sigma$ point-source depth of $r \approx 26$. The Deep layer covers a total of 26~deg$^2$ in four fields, going roughly a magnitude fainter, while the UltraDeep layer goes almost a magnitude fainter still in two pointings of HSC (a total of 3.5 deg$^2$). Here we describe the instrument, the science goals of the survey, and the survey strategy and data processing. This paper serves as an introduction to a special issue of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, which includes a large number of technical and scientific papers describing results from the early phases of this survey.