PRIMER: Public Release IMaging for Extragalactic Research

PRIMER (Public Release IMaging for Extragalactic Research) is a major public Treasury Program designed to provide the astronomical community with an early, large-area, homogenous, deep JWST NIRCam+MIRI imaging survey of enormous power and legacy value. Exploiting to the full the unique near-mid IR imaging capablities of JWST, PRIMER will have an immediate scientific impact, revolutionizing our knowledge of early galaxy and black-hole formation/evolution out to the highest redshifts yet probed. Moreover, executed early in the JWST mission, PRIMER can be a key driver for maximising the exploitation of JWST in subsequent cycles, as it will yield a wealth of new high-redshift targets for follow-up spectroscopy with JWST NIRSpec - we predict that PRIMER will reveal ~120,000 galaxies out to z~12, ~70% of which are new (i.e. undetected by HST or Spitzer). In addition, because PRIMER images the two key equatorial HST CANDELS Legacy Fields (COSMOS and UDS), new high-z targets will also be accessible with ALMA for follow-up at (sub)mm wavelengths, maximising the long-term impact of this major Cycle-1 program. By delivering fully-sampled 10-band NIRCam+MIRI imaging across a wide area, PRIMER enables a wealth of extragalactic science that cannot be addressed by the approved GTO or ERS programs. Indeed, PRIMER increases by a factor of ~20 the area of comparable-quality deep JWST imaging available to the community in Cycle 1, which we show is key to advancing our knowledge of the young Universe. To ensure the success of PRIMER we have assembled a large, expert, multi-national team. We will release all data with zero proprietary time, along with a wealth of higher-level data products.