CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 2MASS PROTOTYPE SURVEY

The 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) will catalog over 100,000,000 indi vidual objects, the vast majority of which will be stars of spectral t ype K and Inter. For many projects it will be important to develop tec hniques to identify interesting objects within this data set. The comb ination of near-IR and visible light observations will be a powerful t ool for finding objects from brown dwarfs to dust-enshrouded quasars. This paper describes prototype hardware and software systems used as p art of the preparation for the 2MASS survey. Three years of observatio ns with prototype systems have produced a database of more than 1 mill ion objects. A companion paper describes the comparison of these data with optical plate material and visible spectroscopic observations res ulting in the discovery of a quasar with a redshift of 0.147.