The SAGE-Spec Spitzer Legacy program: The life-cycle of dust and gas in
  the Large Magellanic Cloud
  The SAGE-Spec Spitzer Legacy program is a spectroscopic follow-up to the
SAGE-LMC photometric survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud carried out with the
Spitzer Space Telescope. We present an overview of SAGE-Spec and some of its
first results. The SAGE-Spec program aims to study the life cycle of gas and
dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and to provide information essential to the
classification of the point sources observed in the earlier SAGE-LMC
photometric survey. We acquired 224.6 hours of observations using the InfraRed
Spectrograph and the SED mode of the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer.
The SAGE-Spec data, along with archival Spitzer spectroscopy of objects in the
Large Magellanic Cloud, are reduced and delivered to the community. We discuss
the observing strategy, the specific data reduction pipelines applied and the
dissemination of data products to the scientific community. Initial science
results include the first detection of an extragalactic "21 um" feature towards
an evolved star and elucidation of the nature of disks around RV Tauri stars in
the Large Magellanic Cloud. Towards some young stars, ice features are observed
in absorption. We also serendipitously observed a background quasar, at a
redshift of z~0.14, which appears to be host-less.
