SHARKS: Southern H-ATLAS Regions Ks-band Survey
SHARKS is an ESO public survey with the near-infrared wide-field imager VIRCAM on the VISTA 4m telescope, awarded 1200 hours. The 300 deg2 survey covers several Herschel-ATLAS fields in the Ks band to a 5σ depth of Ks ~22.7 AB mag. The SHARKS fields have been and will be covered by a number of future deep and/or wide far-IR and radio surveys. Furthermore, future LSST (optical) and EUCLID (near-IR, but not Ks ) observations will overlap SHARKS, representing a perfect complementary dataset with an enormous legacy.
Our main motivations are:
1) To provide the best possible counterpart identification for ~90% of the sources detected at 0 < z < 3 by H-ATLAS , ASKAP , SKA and LOFAR .
2) To produce a sample of a thousand strong lenses for cosmography studies.
3) To study the evolution of the most massive structures in the Universe.
Figure 1: SHARKS footprint (in red) over present and future surveys.