  This paper presents the design and science goals for the SkyMapper telescope.
SkyMapper is a 1.3m telescope featuring a 5.7 square degree field-of-view
Cassegrain imager commissioned for the Australian National University's
Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It is located at Siding Spring
Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia and will see first light in late
2007. The imager possesses 16kx16k 0.5 arcsec pixels. The primary scientific
goal of the facility is to perform the Southern Sky Survey, a six colour and
multi-epoch (4 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year sampling) photometric
survey of the southerly 2pi steradians to g~23 mag. The survey will provide
photometry to better than 3% global accuracy and astrometry to better than 50
mas. Data will be supplied to the community as part of the Virtual Observatory
effort. The survey will take five years to complete.
