Jon Fulbright
Johns Hopkins
 

"Early Science Results from the RAVE Survey"
 

The RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is a large (10⁶ stars) survey of bright (9 < I < 12) stars in the Southern Hemisphere using the 6dF spectrograph on the UK Schmidt telescope.  The medium-resolution spectra of the Ca Triplet region provides accurate radial velocities and stellar parameters for our targets.  The survey input catalog is untargeted, which means nearly all the stellar populations found in the local Galaxy should be represented.

In this talk I will review the status of the survey, plus some of the early science results through RAVE DR2.  Included will be new results of the kinematic structure of the solar neighborhood and our studies of the nature of extreme halo stars and the metal-poor thick disk.