zCOSMOS Spectroscopic Redshift Survey

zCOSMOS (P.I. Simon Lilly) is a large redshift survey undertaken in the COSMOS field using the VIMOS spectrograph mounted at the Melipal Unit Telescope of the VLT at ESO's Cerro Paranal Observatory, Chile. The zCOSMOS redshift survey has been designed to efficiently utilize VIMOS by splitting the sur- vey into two parts. The first, zCOSMOS-bright, which is the subject of DR3, aims to produce a red- shift survey of approximately 20,000 I-band selected galaxies at redshifts z < 1.2. Covering the approximately 1.7 deg2 of the COSMOS field (essentially the full ACS-covered area), the trans- verse dimension at z ~ 1 is 75 Mpc. The second part, zCOSMOS-deep, observed a smaller number of galaxies selected to mostly lie at higher redshifts, 1.5 < z < 3.0. The full set of extracted 1-dimensional spectra are being released, plus a catalogue in which for each target the 1-D spectra filenames, the I-band magnitude used for the selection are given, as well as the measured redshift and confidence class. A full description of the survey can be found in Lilly et al. 2007, ApJS, 172, 70, and Lilly et al. 2009, ApJS, 184, 218.