This redundancy will be a key analysis tool for characterizing and identifying problems with the data. Begin 3 month checkout period. We need this period of analysis and checkout before finalizing the dataset. This analysis should include overlapping data from October-November 1997 and 1998. Fully functional archive hardware and software ready for community access.
Date depends on actual schedule for Southern telescope.
The first release of the 2MASS survey should be of high quality, of a large amount of sky covering a variety of celestial environments, and should be as similar as possible in format and data selection criteria to all subsequent releases. This corresponds to about 6 months of observations, or roughly 0.75-1.0 Tbyte of data, and will give the community an enormous amount of information to digest. It is probably a mistake to plan on releasing data from the Southern survey since the schedule for the entire Southern operation is highly uncertain. There are so many potential problems with a new camera, telescope and a very remote operations system, that it seems foolish to put the solution of those problems in series with our initial data release. If for political reasons it is deemed important to release a small amount of southern data, then we could choose regions that overlap with the Northern survey.