ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM (Biard Lecture)

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, now in its fifth phase, (SDSS-V) is pioneering panoptic spectroscopy: it is the world's first all-sky, multi-epoch, optical-to-infrared MOS+IFU spectroscopic survey. It is mapping the sky with multi-object spectroscopy (MOS) at telescopes in both hemispheres (the 2.5-m Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory and the 100-inch du Pont Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory), where 500 zonal robotic fiber positioners feed light from a wide-field focal plane to an optical (R~ 2,000, 500 fibers) and a near-IR (R~ 22,000, 300 fibers) spectrograph. It is also pioneering ultra wide-field integral field spectroscopy across ~4000~deg^2 enabled by a new dedicated facility (LVM-I) at Las Campanas Observatory, where an IFU with 1801 lenslet-coupled fibers arranged in a 0.5 degree diameter hexagon feeds multiple R~4000 optical spectrographs covering 3600-9800A. SDSS-V's multi-year survey strategy is designed to address the physics of star, black hole and galaxy formation in its 3 mapper programs: the Milky Way Mapper, Black Hole Mapper and the Local Volume Mapper.   I will discuss the SDSS-V program and will also discuss how this robotic survey technology opens exciting new windows for audaciously multiplexed spectroscopic surveys such as the MegaMapper, Spec-S5 and WST.