As a southern hemisphere survey covering 20,000 square degrees of the sky, RAVE's primary aim is to derive the radial velocity of stars from the observed spectra.
Additional information is also derived such as effective temperature, surface gravity, metallicity, photometric parallax and elemental abundance data for the stars.
RAVE is complementary to the SDSS project's SEGUE program as it a southern hemisphere, wide-field, intermediate-depth, intermediate spectral resolution survey with limited wavelength coverage.
The reduced data is then sent to the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany for final extraction of the radial velocities and the other stellar parameters.
Studies from RAVE either concentrate on peculiar stars and objects or overall trends for the different components of our Galaxy, with a main focus of the structure and formation of the Milky Way.
[6] The RAVE 4th Data Release, includes the radial velocities, stellar parameters (temperatures, gravities, metallicities), individual abundances and photometric parallaxes/distances as well as supplementary photometry and astrometry[7] for roughly 500 000 stars.