The Foundation Supernova Survey: Motivation, Design, Implementation, and
  First Data Release
  The Foundation Supernova Survey aims to provide a large, high-fidelity,
homogeneous, and precisely-calibrated low-redshift Type Ia supernova (SN Ia)
sample for cosmology. The calibration of the current low-redshift SN sample is
the largest component of systematic uncertainties for SN cosmology, and new
data are necessary to make progress. We present the motivation, survey design,
observation strategy, implementation, and first results for the Foundation
Supernova Survey. We are using the Pan-STARRS telescope to obtain photometry
for up to 800 SNe Ia at z < 0.1. This strategy has several unique advantages:
(1) the Pan-STARRS system is a superbly calibrated telescopic system, (2)
Pan-STARRS has observed 3/4 of the sky in grizy making future template
observations unnecessary, (3) we have a well-tested data-reduction pipeline,
and (4) we have observed ~3000 high-redshift SNe Ia on this system. Here we
present our initial sample of 225 SN Ia griz light curves, of which 180 pass
all criteria for inclusion in a cosmological sample. The Foundation Supernova
Survey already contains more cosmologically useful SNe Ia than all other
published low-redshift SN Ia samples combined. We expect that the systematic
uncertainties for the Foundation Supernova Sample will be 2-3 times smaller
than other low-redshift samples. We find that our cosmologically useful sample
has an intrinsic scatter of 0.111 mag, smaller than other low-redshift samples.
We perform detailed simulations showing that simply replacing the current
low-redshift SN Ia sample with an equally sized Foundation sample will improve
the precision on the dark energy equation-of-state parameter by 35%, and the
dark energy figure-of-merit by 72%.
