The Dark Energy Survey

 

National Science Foundation   The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14 billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 120 scientists from 23 institutions in the U.S., Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Germany are working on the project. This collaboration is building an extremely sensitive, 570-megapixel digital camera, DECam, and will mount it on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory high in the Chilean Andes. Starting in September 2012, and continuing for five years, DES will survey a large swath of the southern sky out to vast distances in order to provide new clues to this most fundamental of questions. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will operate a sophisticated data management pipeline for DES. DES will gather an enormous amount of data, capturing terabytes every night. Working closely with the DES collaboration and the Illinois Department of Astronomy, NCSA has developed a system for processing, calibrating and archiving the wealth of data that will be gathered by DES. The system will use high-performance computing resources provided by the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment project. NCSA and the University of Illinois have been involved in the DES collaboration since 2005. The data management tools have been tested through periodic data challenges, working with simulated data that has progressively become closer and closer in volume and complexity to what will be gathered when DES comes online next year. To learn more about DES, see the story Dark Energy Project: Moving Forward in the Spring 2008 issue of NCSA Access magazine. (Date of Image: March 2008) Credit: National Center for Supercomputer Applications See other images like this in NSF's Science360 for iPad app. To download the Science360 for iPad application for free, visit the Apple iTunes store. General Restrictions: Images and other media in the National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery are available for use in print and electronic material by NSF employees, members of the media, university staff, teachers and the general public. All media in the gallery are intended for personal, educational and nonprofit/non-commercial use only. Images credited to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, are in the public domain. The images were created by employees of the United States Government as part of their official duties or prepared by contractors as "works for hire" for NSF. You may freely use NSF-credited images and, at your discretion, credit NSF with a "Courtesy: National Science Foundation" notation. Additional information about general usage can be found in ConditioNS Courtesy: National Science Foundation