  The Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project (HTTP) is an ongoing panchromatic
imaging survey of stellar populations in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large
Magellanic Cloud that reaches into the sub-solar mass regime (< 0.5 Mo). HTTP
utilizes the capability of HST to operate the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS)
and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in parallel to study this remarkable region
in the near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared spectral regions, including
narrow band H$\alpha$ images. The combination of all these bands provides a
unique multi-band view. The resulting maps of the stellar content of the
Tarantula Nebula within its main body provide the basis for investigations of
star formation in an environment resembling the extreme conditions found in
starburst galaxies and in the early Universe. Access to detailed properties of
individual stars allows us to begin to reconstruct the evolution of the stellar
skeleton of the Tarantula Nebula over space and time with parcsec-scale
resolution. In this first paper we describe the observing strategy, the
photometric techniques, and the upcoming data products from this survey and
present preliminary results obtained from the analysis of the initial set of
near-infrared observations.
