NSF Award
0715596
AST-0715596/0715036<br/>Peoples/Mohr<br/><br/>The Dark Energy Survey (DES) brings together an accomplished international collaboration of physicists and astronomers to address one of today's most compelling questions: What is the nature of the Dark Energy that appears to dominate the Universe and cause the cosmic expansion to accelerate? More specifically, does the Dark Energy reflect the physics of the vacuum, or is it some completely new kind of material with bizarre properties? DES will take this step by applying four complementary techniques with a single instrument: the redshift distribution of galaxy clusters; weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structure; the evolution of the baryon acoustic oscillations imprinted around the time of recombination; and supernova distances. To carry out this project, the DES Collaboration will build a new wide-field optical CCD camera for the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), and a highly automated, grid-enabled data management system to process the resulting data.<br/><br/>As part of carrying out its fundamental science, DES will create the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) and an associated community-needs pipeline, which will henceforth be a facility instrument at CTIO and thus widely available to the astronomy community. The combination of wide field and high throughput makes DECam ten times more powerful than existing facility instruments. The DES data archive will be publicly available as a rich legacy for fundamental astronomical work, especially in combination with other data sets for synergistic studies that can be expected to open up new areas of research. The DES collaboration will also train and educate young scientists to work in teams across intellectual and international boundaries.<br/><br/>This project will proceed in stages with major milestones along the way, requiring a number of separate awards for further support as each stage progresses. This present award is for support primarily of the Data Management System (DESDM), to be developed simultaneously with work on DECam, which is being supported by the Department of Energy. The lead of this collaboration is Dr Peoples, whose award covers support to help manage this complex, multi-institution, international project. The non-lead award for Dr Mohr constitutes the bulk of the funding, for development work towards the DESDM.
