The next frontier for comprehensive galaxy surveys is the epoch, the peak of star formation and black hole activity. Despite the new windows that spitzer and herschel have opened up into the stellar…

This federal contract award, valued at $224,615.46, was granted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the Regents of the University of California at Riverside (UC Riverside). The contract, titled "ENHANCING THE LEGACY OF SPITZER AND HERSCHEL WITH THE MOSFIRE DEEP EVOLUTION FIELD SURVEY," aims to conduct a large spectroscopic survey using the MOSFIRE instrument on the Keck Telescope. The survey, known as MOSDEF, will obtain optical spectra for approximately 1,500 distant galaxies, providing critical data to support the analysis of observations from the Spitzer and Herschel space telescopes. This contract does not have a set-aside designation and is structured as a grant for research, with a performance period ending on July 16, 2018. UC Riverside, a public research university and part of the University of California system, has extensive expertise in areas such as astronomy, astrophysics, and space science, making it well-suited to execute this NASA-funded project.

The next frontier for comprehensive galaxy surveys is the epoch, the peak of star formation and black hole activity. Despite the new windows that spitzer and herschel have opened up into the stellar and dust emission of distant galaxies and AGN during this key epoch, these studies have been limited by the lack of spectroscopic redshifts and the unknown physical conditions, for example metallicities, ionization, within the targeted galaxies. To realize the full potential of spitzer and herschel, we require a large spectroscopic survey that will, efficiently assemble spectroscopic redshifts for large samples of galaxies, yield the physical conditions, including the ionization and metallicities of these galaxies, and easily obtain spectroscopic redshifts even for very dusty/confused galaxies. To this end, our team has been allocated a large program of 47 keck nights with the multi object near IR spectrograph mosfire to carry out the mosfire deep evolution field survey, in three of the hubble candels fields. Mosdef will obtain rest optical spectra of ~1500 galaxies at redshifts, targeting many of the optical nebular emission lines and continuum features that until now have been inaccessible for large samples of distant galaxies, but which are routinely used to measure the sfrs, dust attenuation, metal and gas content, and ionization and dynamical properties in nearby galaxies. Mosdef spectroscopy provides a critical supporting role for the analysis of spitzer and herschel observations of distant galaxies