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Our Cycle-1 program, while not formally a Legacy program, shares many
characteristics with Legacy programs in that our data were released with
no proprietary period, and we promised to deliver data products to the SSC. This program was for
134.4 hours and the submitted abstract was :
The star-forming clouds nearest to our Sun are located 140 pc away in Taurus. Lacking young stellar clusters and luminous OB stars, Taurus hosts a distributed mode of star formation that has proven particularly amenable to observational and theoretical study. Yet despite its importance to the past two decades of star formation research, only fragments of the Taurus clouds are currently planned for mapping with the Spitzer Space Telescope. We propose to make a comprehensive, unbiased map of the TMC using MIPS and IRAC, covering an area of 28 square degrees. Achieving sensitivities 20 times better than ISOCAM at 8 microns, and 200 times better than IRAS at 24 microns, these maps will reveal the lowest luminosity members of the young stellar population: collapsing protostars, young substellar objects, and edge-on disks. Due to the importance of this dataset in establishing new objects for followup with Spitzer and HST, we will waive our proprietary rights to the data and make the images and source catalogs available to the community upon completion of the survey. This survey will be a central and crucial part of a multiwavelength study of the Taurus cloud complex that we are already conducting using XMM and CFHT. The 5 - 7 photometry data points we will obtain from Spitzer will allow us to characterize the circumstellar environment of each object, and, in conjunction with NIR photometry, construct a complete luminosity function for the cloud members that will place constraints on the initial mass function. Our Cycle-3 program was designed finish off the original Taurus map. This program was for 60 hours and the submitted abstract was:
The star-forming clouds nearest to our Sun are located 140 pc away in Taurus. Lacking young stellar clusters and luminous OB stars, Taurus hosts a distributed mode of star formation that has proven particularly amenable to observational and theoretical study. Last year, our team mapped the central 30 square degrees of the main Taurus cloud. A new, high resolution CO map of the region by Goldsmith et al. (2005) shows that Spitzer has not yet mapped the western portion of the cloud which contains interesting star formation activity. In addition, changes made to GTO program 6 last year have resulted in insufficient coverage of the important L1495 and L1536 clouds. We propose to complete our comprehensive, unbiased and spatially contiguous map of the TMC using MIPS and IRAC, adding an area of 24 square degrees and restoring full coverage of L1495 and L1536. Achieving sensitivities 20 times better than ISOCAM at 8 microns, and 200 times better than IRAS at 24 microns, these maps will reveal the lowest luminosity members of the young stellar population in western Taurus: collapsing protostars, young substellar objects, and edge-on disks. Due to the importance of this dataset for the star formation community, we request that our program be granted Legacy status. As with our previous GO1 program, our team will waive our proprietary rights to the data and make the images and source catalogs from the entire Spitzer Taurus survey available to the community in 2006 and 2007. This survey is a central and crucial part of a multiwavelength study of the Taurus cloud complex that we have performed using XMM, and CFHT. The seven photometry data points we will obtain from Spitzer will allow us to characterize the circumstellar environment of each object, and, in conjunction with NIR photometry, construct a complete luminosity function for the cloud members that will place constraints on the initial mass function.
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