HALO7D: Disentangling the Milky Way Accretion History with Observations in 7 Dimensions

The Milky Way (MW) is shrouded in a faint metal-poor stellar halo. Its structure and kinematics provide a unique archaeological record of the MW's formation, past evolution, and accretion history. These data also help us constrain the dark matter mass out to large radii (50 to 100 kpc). However, studies of the MW stellar halo are hindered by observational constraints. Beyond D~10 kpc, our knowledge of the MW halo is limited to line of sight velocities and rare tracer populations (blue horizontal branch and red giant branch stars). We aim to address these limitations using highly accurate HST-measured proper motions and very deep (8-24 hour integrations) Keck DEIMOS spectroscopy of MW main sequence turn-off stars in the CANDELS fields. By combining these two datasets, we can obtain 6D phase-space information plus chemical abundances (7 "Dimensions") for our halo stars. This survey, which will be unique even in the era of Gaia, will vastly improve our understanding of the Milky Way structure, evolution and mass in a way that neither the HST proper motions nor Keck spectroscopy can do on their own.