Hobby-Eberly Telescope Chemical Abundances of Stars in the Halo (CASH) project : spectroscopic analyses of the first ~80 stars

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Chemical Abundances of Stars in the Halo (CASH) project aims to characterize the nature of the early universe through the study of metal-poor stars in the stellar halo of the galaxy. Once completed, this will be the largest set of abundances determined for metal-poor stars from high resolution spectra. In this paper, we present chemical abundances and trends of eleven elements for the first ~80 stars of the ~500 star study. These 80 stars serve as a pilot sample to test the automated stellar parameter and abundance determination pipeline newly developed for the CASH project called CASHCODE. Among the pilot sample, two stars with [Fe/H]<-3.5 were discovered and their abundance analysis is discussed.