LAMOST望远镜是我国自主创新设计和研制的世界上最大口径的大视场望远镜,也是目前世界上光谱获取率最高的望远镜.它的研制成功改变了我国在大规模光谱观测和大型天文基础观测数据方面空白的面貌.LAMOST作为国家设备向全国天文界开放,并积极开展国际合作.LAMOST致力于银河系内恒星的巡天,为开展银河系结构和演化前沿研究,精确描绘银河系,特别是银盘的星族、恒星运动和金属丰度分布,揭示银河系恒星形成和化学增丰历史,精确绘制银河系物质组成等方面研究提供了大量可靠的光谱观测数据.
The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) adopts an innovative active optics technique that changes mirror surface continuously to achieve a series different reflecting Schmidt systems at different moments. The key technical innovations makes it a unique astronomical instrument combining the largest aperture with a wide field of view, and it is the telescope with the highest spectrum acquiring rate by 4000 fibers in the world. The observed declination of the telescope covers from -10° to 90°. There are two major components of the LAMOST survey: The LAMOST ExtraGAlactic Survey (LEGAS) and the LAMOST Experiment for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (LEGUE). It is known that the Milky Way is the only galaxy that we can study in enough detail, and the LEGUE survey can be divided into three parts according to sky coverage: the Galactic spheroid, the disk and the Galactic anticenter, and will observe a huge sample of stars of our Galaxy. At the moment, LAMOST survey focuses on the stellar spectra of our Galaxy, and will obtain optical spectra for statistically complete samples totaling at least 7.5 million Galactic stars from the thin- and thick-disk and halo during the first five year survey. It will open up new windows in near-field cosmology. LAMOST opened a new road to the large scale optical fiber spectroscopic sky surveys in China. As a national large scientific project, the spectra from the survey are opened to all Chinese astronomers. With this huge spectra database stellar kinematics can be obtained and the metallicity distribution function in the Galaxy will be derived, especially those within a few kpc of the Sun. With the structures revealed from such a large survey, it is possible for us to systematically map out the spatial density, Galactocentric rotation velocity and velocity ellipsoid, and chemical abundance of stars as a function of position in the Galaxy. These results will provide important constraints on the present models of Galactic structure, f