The Herschel Reference Survey

The Herschel Reference Survey is a guaranteed time Herschel ke y project and will be a benchmark study of dust in the nearby universe. The survey will complement a n umber of other Herschel key projects including large cosmological surveys that trace dust in th e distant universe. We will use Herschel to produce images of a statistically-complete sample of 32 3 galaxies at 250, 350 and 500 mu m. The sample is volume-limited, containing sources with distances betwe en 15 and 25 Mpc and flux limits in the K-band to minimize the selection effects associated with dus t and with young high-mass stars and to introduce a selection in stellar mass. The sample spans t he whole range of morphological types (ellipticals to late-type spirals) and environments (from the fi eld to the centre of the Virgo Cluster) and as such will be useful for other purposes than our ow n. We plan to use the survey to investigate (i) the dust content of galaxies as a function of Hubble t ype, stellar mass and environment, (ii) the connection between the dust content and composition and t he other phases of the interstellar medium and (iii) the origin and evolution of dust in galaxies. In this paper , we describe the goals of the survey, the details of the sample and some of the auxiliary obs erving programs that we have started to collect complementary data. We also use the available mult i-frequency data to carry out an analysis of the statistical properties of the sample.