The Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey (GAMA) is a project to exploit the latest generation of ground-based wide-field survey facilities to study cosmology and galaxy formation and evolution. GAMA will bring together data from a number of world class instruments:

• The Anglo-Australian Telescope
  Anglo-Australian Telescope
  The Anglo-Australian Telescope is a 3.9 m equatorially mounted telescope operated by the Australian Astronomical Observatory and situated at the Siding Spring Observatory, Australia at an altitude of a little over 1100 m...
  
   (AAT),
• The VLT Survey Telescope
  VLT Survey Telescope
  The VLT Survey Telescope is the latest telescope to be added to ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It is housed in an enclosure immediately adjacent to the four Very Large Telescope Unit Telescopes on the summit of Cerro Paranal. The VST is a wide-field survey...
  
   (VST)
• The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy
  VISTA (telescope)
  The VISTA is a reflecting telescope with a 4.1 metre mirror, located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. It is operated by the European Southern Observatory and saw first light in December 2009...
  
   (VISTA)
• The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
  Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
  The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP, is CSIRO’s new radio telescope currently under construction at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Mid West region of Western Australia...
  
   (ASKAP)
• The Herschel Space Observatory
  Herschel Space Observatory
  The Herschel Space Observatory is a European Space Agency space observatory sensitive to the far infrared and submillimetre wavebands. It is the largest space telescope ever launched, carrying a single mirror of in diameter....
  
  
• The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX)

Data from these instruments will be used to construct a state-of-the-art multi-wavelength database of ~375,000 galaxies in the local Universe over a 360 deg2 region of sky,
based around a spectroscopic redshift survey on the AAT's AAOmega spectrograph.

The main objective of GAMA is to study structure on scales of 1 kpc to 1 Mpc. This includes galaxy clusters, groups, mergers and coarse measurements of galaxy structure (i.e., bulges and discs). It is on these scales where baryons play a critical role in the galaxy formation and subsequent evolutionary processes and where our understanding of structure in the Universe breaks down.

GAMA's primary goal is to test the CDM paradigm of structure formation. In particular, the key scientific objectives are:

• A measurement of the dark matter halo mass function of groups and clusters using group velocity dispersion measurements.
• A comprehensive determination of the galaxy stellar mass function to Magellanic Cloud masses to constrain baryonic feedback processes.
• A direct measurement of the recent galaxy merger rates as a function of mass, mass ratio, local environment and galaxy type.